title: Reconstruction era

text: Economists and economic historians have different interpretations of the economic impact of race on the postbellum Southern economy. In 1995, Robert Whaples took a random survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association, who studied American history in all time periods. He asked whether they wholly or partly accepted, or rejected, 40 propositions in the scholarly literature about American economic history. The greatest difference between economics PhDs and history PhDs came in questions on competition and race. For example, the proposition originally put forward by Robert Higgs, "in the post-bellum South economic competition among Whites played an important part in protecting blacks from racial coercion", was accepted in whole or part by 66% of the economists, but by only 22% of the historians. Whaples says this highlights: "A recurring difference dividing historians and economists. The economists have more faith in the power of the competitive market. For example, they see the competitive market as protecting disenfranchised blacks and are less likely to accept the idea that there was exploitation by merchant monopolists."


title: Reconstruction era

text: Reconstruction is widely considered a failure, though the reason for this is a matter of controversy.


title: Reconstruction era

text: Historian Donald R. Shaffer maintained that the gains during Reconstruction for African Americans were not entirely extinguished. The legalization of African American marriages and families and the independence of Black churches from White denominations were a source of strength during the Jim Crow era. Reconstruction was never forgotten within the Black community and it remained a source of inspiration. The system of sharecropping granted Blacks a considerable amount of freedom as compared to slavery.


title: Reconstruction era

text: However, in 2014, historian Mark Summers argued that the "failure" question should be looked at from the viewpoint of the war goals; in that case, he argues:


title: Reconstruction era

text: The journalist Joel Chandler Harris, who wrote under the name "Joe Harris" for the "Atlanta Constitution" (mostly after Reconstruction), tried to advance racial and sectional reconciliation in the late 19th century. He supported Henry W. Grady's vision of a New South during Grady's time as editor from 1880 to 1889. Harris wrote many editorials in which he encouraged Southerners to accept the changed conditions along with some Northern influences, but he asserted his belief that change should proceed under White supremacy.


title: Reconstruction era

text: In popular literature, two early 20th-century novels by Thomas Dixon Jr. – "The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden – 1865–1900" (1902), and "" (1905) – idealized White resistance to Northern and Black coercion, hailing vigilante action by the Ku Klux Klan. D. W. Griffith adapted Dixon's "The Clansman" for the screen in his anti-Republican movie "The Birth of a Nation" (1915); it stimulated the formation of the 20th-century version of the KKK. Many other authors romanticized the supposed benevolence of slavery and the elite world of the antebellum plantations, in memoirs and histories which were published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted influential works which were written in these genres by women.


title: Reconstruction era

text: Of much more lasting impact was the story "Gone with the Wind", first in the form of the best-selling 1936 novel, which enabled its author Margaret Mitchell to win the Pulitzer Prize, and an award-winning Hollywood blockbuster with the same title in 1939. In each case, the second half of the story focuses on Reconstruction in Atlanta. The book sold millions of copies nationwide; the film is regularly re-broadcast on television. In 2018, it remained at the top of the list of highest-grossing films, adjusted in order to keep up with inflation. The "New Georgia Encyclopedia" argues:


title: Reconstruction era

text: The "Dunning School" dominated white scholarship about Reconstruction during most of the 20th century. Black scholarship on the Reconstruction era was mostly ignored until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, though the racist interpretations of the Dunning School continue to this day.


title: Reconstruction era

text: Historian Eric Foner said, "for no other period of American history does so wide a gap exist between current scholarship and popular historical understanding, which, judging from references to Reconstruction in recent newspaper articles, films, popular books, and in public monuments across the country, still bears the mark of the old Dunning School."


title: Reconstruction era

text: As reported in a January 2022 "Time" magazine article:In social studies standards for 45 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, discussion of Reconstruction is "partial" or "non-existent", according to historians who reviewed how the period is discussed in K-12 social studies standards for public schools nationwide. In a report produced by the education nonprofit Zinn Education Project, the study's authors say they are concerned that American children will grow up to be uninformed about a critical period of history that helps explain why full racial equality remains unfulfilled today.The Zinn Education Project's report, Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, highlights the historical connections to Reconstruction that surround us today and examines Reconstruction's place in state social studies standards across the United States and the barriers to teaching effective Reconstruction history.


title: Reconstruction era

text: According to a "Facing South" article entitled "The South's schools are failing to teach accurate Reconstruction history":"It is our hope that states and districts will adopt these guidelines for their own educational standards, curricula, and professional development," the report states. "In so doing, they will be better equipped to teach students the true history of Reconstruction, help students understand its significance and make connections to the present day. And they will empower teachers to educate their students and themselves about ongoing Reconstruction scholarship."


title: Reconstruction era

text: Georgia was first readmitted to the U.S. Congress on July 25, 1868, but it was expelled on March 3, 1869. Virginia had been represented in the U.S. Senate until March 3, 1865, by the Restored Government of Virginia.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro, previously called Dnipropetrovsk from 1926 until May 2016, is Ukraine's fourth-largest city, with about one million inhabitants. It is located in the eastern part of Ukraine, southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv on the Dnieper River, after which its Ukrainian language name (Dnipro) it is named. Dnipro is the administrative centre of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. It hosts the administration of Dnipro urban hromada. The population of Dnipro is


title: Dnipro

text: Archeological evidence suggests the site of the present city was settled by Cossack communities from at least 1524. The town, named Yekaterinoslav ("the glory of Catherine"), was established by decree of the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in 1787 as the administrative center of Novorossiya. From the end of the nineteenth century, the town attracted foreign capital and an international, multi-ethnic, workforce exploiting Kryvbas iron ore and Donbas coal.


title: Dnipro

text: Renamed "Dnipropetrovsk" in 1926 after the Ukrainian Communist Party leader Grigory Petrovsky, it became a focus for the Stalin-era commitment to the rapid development of heavy industry. After the Second World War, this included nuclear, arms, and space industries whose strategic importance led to Dnipropetrovsk's designation as a "closed city".


title: Dnipro

text: Following the Euromaidan events of 2014, the city shifted politically away from parties and political figures supportive of continued close ties to Russia, and toward those wishing to celebrate the achievement in 1991 of Ukrainian national statehood and to develop relations with the European Union and the West. The change has been reflected by the removal of Soviet-era symbols including, from May 2016, "Petrovsk" from the name of city.


title: Dnipro

text: Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Dnipro rapidly developed as a logistical hub for humanitarian aid and a reception point for people fleeing the various battle fronts.


title: Dnipro

text: The original name of a Ukrainian Cossack city on the territory of modern Dnipro was New Kodak. Also on the territory of Modern Dnipro, the Russian Empire founded Yekaterinoslav ("the glory of Catherine"). This name was first mentioned in a report to Azov Governor to Grigory Potemkin on 23 April 1776. He wrote "The provincial city called Yekaterinoslav should be the best convenience on the right side of the Dnieper River near Kaydak..." (Which referred to ). The construction was officially transferred to the right bank in a decree of Empress of Russia Catherine II of 23 January 1784.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1918, the Central Council of Ukraine proposed to change the name of the city to "Sicheslav"; however, this was never finalised.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1926 the city was renamed after communist leader Grigory Petrovsky. The 2015 law on decommunization required the city to be renamed, and on 19 May 2016 the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill to officially rename the city to "Dnipro"..


title: Dnipro

text: Following the renaming of the city the reference to Petrovsky has been removed from institutions named after the city. A notable exception is the name of the surrounding province, which is listed in the territorial structure of Ukraine in the Constitution. Thus until a lengthy and complicated process of amending is carried out, it officially retains the name Dnipropetrovska oblast.


title: Dnipro

text: Scholarship concerning the foundation of the city has been subject to political considerations and dispute. In 1976, to have the bicentenary of the city coincide with the 70th anniversary of the birth of Soviet party leader, and regional native son, Leonid Brezhnev, the date of the city's foundation was moved back from the visit Russian Empress Catherine II in 1787, to 1776.


title: Dnipro

text: Following Ukrainian independence, local historians began to promote the idea of a town emerging in the 17th century from Cossack settlements, an approach aimed at promoting the city's Ukrainian identity. They cited the chronicler of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Dmytro Yavornytsky, whose "History of the City of Ekaterinoslav" completed in 1940 was authorised for publication only in 1989, the era of Glasnost.


title: Dnipro

text: Human settlements in current Dnipropetrovsk Oblast date from the Paleolithic era. According to archeological finds, in the Paleolithic period (7—3 thousand "Anno Domini") human settlements appear near the in what is now Chechelivskyi District and on Monastyrskyi Island. A Neolithic stonecrafter's house has been excavated in one of Dnipro's city parks. In the Bronze Age the area was settled by diverse tribes. Traces of Cimmerian settlements during the Bronze age have been found near today's . The area of modern Dnipro was part of the Scythian empire from approximately the 1th century BC until the 3rd century BC. During the Migration Period (300–800) nomadic tribes of the Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, and Magyars passed through the lands of the Dnieper region, they came into contact with local agricultural East Slavs.


title: Dnipro

text: The area of modern Dnipro was part of Kievan Rus' (882–1240). The region witnessed fighting between the armies of Kievan Rus' and Khazars, Pechenegs, Tork people and Cumans. In the 13th century the Dnieper region was devastated during the Mongol Empire conquest of Kievan Rus'. The area of modern Dnipro city was incorporated into the Mongol's khanate Golden Horde.


title: Dnipro

text: In the 15th century the area became part of the Kiev Voivodeship (1471–1565) of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Archeological finds in today's Dnipro's urban district Samarskyi District suggest that the important river crossing was a trading settlement from at least 1524. In 1635, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth built the Kodak Fortress above the Dnieper Rapids at "Kodaky" on the south-eastern outskirts of modern Dnipro near the current Kaidatsky Bridge, only to have it destroyed within months by the Cossacks of Ivan Sulyma. Rebuilt in 1645, it was captured by Zaporozhian Sich in 1648.


title: Dnipro

text: Around the fortress a settlement emerged that became a town in (province) of the Zaporizhian Sich called . Cossacks often hid the true number of the population in order to reduce taxation and other obligations, but according to documentary evidence, it can be assumed that the population of New Kodak was at least 3,000 people. The fortress was garrisoned by Cossacks until the Sich, allied with the Ottoman Empire and their Tartar vassals, drove out the encroaching Tsardom of Russia. Under the terms of the Russian withdrawal—the Treaty of the Pruth in 1711—the Kodak fortress was demolished.


title: Dnipro

text: In the mid-1730s, the fortress and Russians returned, living in an uneasy cohabitation with local cossacks. From mid-century they co-existed with the Zaporozhian sloboda (or "free settlement") of "Polovytsia" located on the site of today's Central Terminal and the "Ozyorka" farmers market.


title: Dnipro

text: In the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the Zaporozhian cossacks allied with Empress Catherine II. No sooner had they assisted the Russians to victory than they faced an imperial ultimatum to disband their confederation. The liquidation of the Sich destroyed their political autonomy and saw the incorporation of their lands into the new governates of Novorossiya. In 1784, Catherine ordered the foundation of new city, commonly referred to at the time as Katerynoslav.


title: Dnipro

text: The first written mention of a town in the Russian Empire called Yekaterinoslav can be found in a report from Azov Governor to Grigory Potemkin on 23 April 1776. He wrote "The provincial city called Yekaterinoslav should be the best convenience on the right side of the Dnieper River near Kaydak..." (Which referred to ). In 1777, a town named Yekaterinoslav ("the glory of Catherine"), was built to the north of the present-day city at the confluence of the Samara and Kilchen rivers. The site was badly chosen – spring waters transformed the city into a bog. The surviving settlement was later renamed Novomoskovsk.


title: Dnipro

text: The territory of modern Dnipro, despite the modern-day city's size, still has not expanded to encompass the territory of (Chertkov's) Yekaterinoslav of 1776. On 22 January 1784 Russian Empress Catherine the Great signed an Imperial Ukase directing that "the gubernatorial city under name of Yekaterinoslav be moved to the right bank of the Dnieper river near Kodak". The new city would serve Grigory Potemkin as a Viceregal seat for the combined Novorossiya and Azov Governorates.


title: Dnipro

text: On , in the course of her celebrated Crimean journey, the Empress laid the foundation stone of the Transfiguration Cathedral in the presence of Austrian Emperor Joseph II, Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski, and the French and English ambassadors. Potemkin's grandiose plans for a third Russian imperial capital alongside Moscow and Saint Petersburg included a viceregal palace, a university (Potemkin envisioned Yekaterinoslav as the 'Athens of southern Russia'), courts of law and a botanical garden, were frustrated by a renewal of the Russo-Turkish war in 1787, by bureaucratic procrastination, defective workmanship, and theft, Potemkin's death in 1791 and that of his imperial patroness five years later.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1815 a government official described the town as "more like some Dutch [Mennonite] colony then a provincial administrative centre". The cathedral, much reduced in size, was completed in 1835.


title: Dnipro

text: While into the late nineteenth the principal business of the town remained the processing of agricultural raw materials, there was an early state-sponsored effort to promote manufacture. In 1794 the government supported two factories: a textile factory that was transferred from the town of Dubrovny Mogilev Governorate and a silk-stockings factory that was brought from the village of Kupavna near Moscow. In 1797 the textile factory employed 819 permanent workers, 378 of whom were women and 115 children. The silk stocking workers, the majority being women, were serfs bought at an auction for 16,000 rubles. Conditions, as Potemkin himself was forced to admit, were harsh, with many of the workers dying from malnutrition and exhaustion.


title: Dnipro

text: From 1797 to 1802, while serving under the Emperor Paul I as the administrative centre of a centre of the Novorossiya Governorate, the settlement was officially known as "Novorossiysk."


title: Dnipro

text: Despite the bridging of the Dnieper in 1796 and commerce was slow to develop. 1832 saw the establishment of the small Zaslavsky iron-casting factory, the town's first metallurgical enterprise. Industrialisation gathered a pace in the 1880s with the establishment of the first railway connections. Rail construction responded to the enterprise of two men: John Hughes, a Welsh businessman who built an iron works at what is now Donetsk (then Yuzovka) in 1869–72, and developed the Donetsk coal deposits; and the Russian geologist Alexander Pol, who in 1866 had discovered the Kryvyi Rih iron ore basin, Kryvbas, during archaeological research.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1884, a railway to supply pig iron foundries in Kryvyi Rih with Donetsk coal crossed the Dnieper at Yekaterinoslav. It proved a spur to further industrial development and to the creation of the new suburbs of Amur and Nyzhnodniprovsk.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1897, Yekaterinoslav became the third city in the Russian Empire to have electric trams. The "Yekaterinoslav Higher Mining School", today's Dnipro Polytechnic, was founded in 1899. Within twenty years the population had more than tripled, reaching 157,000 in 1904. The immigrants flowing into the city were mainly ethnic or cultural Russians and Jews, with the Ukrainian population remaining rural in this stage of the industrial revolution.


title: Dnipro

text: From 1792 Yekaterinoslav was within the Pale of Settlement, the former Polish-Lithuanian territories in which Catherine and her successors enforced no limitation on the movement and residency of their Jewish subjects. Within less than a century, a largely Yiddish-speaking Jewish community of 40,000 constituted more than a third of the city's population, and contributed a considerable share of its business capital and industrial workforce.


title: Dnipro

text: Such apparent strength did not protect the community—members of whom had had the unpopular task of collecting government taxes and recruiting young men for the army— from communal violence. In 1883, three days of rioting destroyed Jewish business, and persuaded many to temporarily leave the city. There was a return of anti–Semitic incitement among the Christian public in 1904, but attacks on community were, at that time, suppressed on the order of a liberal governor.


title: Dnipro

text: In the widespread social unrest that followed the 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the political life of the city was dominated by the revolutionary opposition (including the Jewish Workers Socialist Party and the Bund) and by the insurrectionary spirit of the nascent labor movement. The local czarist authorities were able to ride out the wave political protests and strikes, in part by playing on division between Jewish workers who predominated as clerks and artisans in the city, and Russian workers employed in the large suburban factories. There was a wave of anti-Semitic attacks. With the army intervening against Jewish defense groups, about 100 Jews were killed and two hundred wounded.


title: Dnipro

text: According to local historian Andrii Portnov, 40% of the local Yekaterinoslav population was Jewish in the years leading up to World War I.


title: Dnipro

text: Directly following the Russian February revolution, in the night of 3 March O.S (16 March N.S) to 4 March 1917 a provisional government was organised in Yekaterinoslav headed by the (since 1913) chairman of the provincial land administration . Also on 4 March a Council of Workers' Deputies was formed. On 6 March the prime minister of the Russian Provisional Government Georgy Lvov removed the governor and the vice-governor of Yekaterinoslav Governorate, temporarily handing these powers to Hesberg. On 9 March a Yekaterinoslav Council of Workers and Soldiers deputies was formed.


title: Dnipro

text: On 16 May the Council of Workers' Deputies and the Council of Workers and Soldiers merged, to become named the Revolutionary Council in November 1917. All these power structures existed in duality, with Hesberg's provisional government often being in a disadvantage. In 1917 the city saw numerous meetings, rallies, meetings, conferences, congresses and demonstrations by political parties all over the political spectrum. Due to intense political agitation the newly formed factory committees and professional unions by autumn of 1917 mainly supported the Bolsheviks, significantly strengthening their positions.


title: Dnipro

text: In June 1917 a Central Council (Tsentralna Rada) of Ukrainian parties in Kyiv declared Yekaterinoslav to be within the territory of the autonomous Ukrainian People's Republic. On 13 August 1917 the first democratic Yekaterinoslav 120 seats city Duma election took place. The Bolsheviks gained 24 seats and the Mensheviks 16, with pro-Ukrainian parties picking up 6 seats. was elected Mayor of the city. Osipov was Mayor until the dissolution of the city Duma in May 1918. On 10 November 1917 a parade of Ukrainian troops was held, organized by the Yekaterinoslav Ukrainian Military Council in support of the Third Universal of the Ukrainian Central Council, the proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic.


title: Dnipro

text: In the November 1917 elections to the Russian Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviks secured just under 18 percent of the vote in the Governorate, compared to 46 percent for the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and their allies. On 22 November 1917 the Revolutionary Council and the city Duma pledged their allegiance to the Tsentralna Rada. The Bolsheviks then left these organisations. During December, the situation in the city worsened with both sides preparing for military action.


title: Dnipro

text: On 26 December pro-Tsentralna Rada forces presented to the Bolsheviks an ultimatum to completely disarm. The Bolsheviks rejected the ultimatum. The following day the pro-Tsentralna Rada forces began artillery shelling of the Yekaterinoslav's Bryansk plant, where the headquarters of the Bolsheviks and its main forces were located. The shells hit a barracks holding Austro-Hungarian army prisoners of war, who worked at the plant, killing six and wounding 28. Fighting continued until 29 December 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Yekaterinoslav, greatly helped by the arrival of an armored train with troops the previous day. The Bolsheviks were able to keep it under their control until 4 April 1918. The Bolsheviks declared the city part of a Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic.


title: Dnipro

text: In the March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks conceded their Ukrainian held territory. In the aftermath of this treaty the Central Powers forces advanced over 500 miles, capturing the whole of Ukraine and some territory beyond. On 5 April 1918 the Imperial German army took control of Yekaterinoslav. 500 Bolshevik Red Guards were publicly executed. Repression against workers continued in the following days.


title: Dnipro

text: From 9 April to 29 April 1918 the Ukrainian People's Republic was in charge in the city. After a Central Powers intervention on 29 April 1918 the German-controlled Ukrainian State replaced the Ukrainian People's Republic authority (also in Yekaterinoslav).


title: Dnipro

text: On 18 May 1918 the Hetman of the Ukrainian State Pavlo Skoropadskyi ordered that previous nationalized enterprises should be returned to their former owners. On 18 August the Ukrainian State dissolved the city Duma elected in 1917 and replaced it with the one installed in 1914. In the summer of 1918 Yekaterinoslav experienced mass unemployment and major strikes. The forming of organized labour groups was suppressed. Austro-Hungarian troops that occupied the city tried to forcefully end the strikes.


title: Dnipro

text: In the fall of 1918 the Ukrainian State was deteriorating and its grip on Yekaterinoslav consequently weakened. In November and December the Bolsheviks tried to gain control of the city through various strikes but were unable to do so because of lack of support of more moderate forces. In November various parts of the city were controlled by either the Bolsheviks, the Directorate of the Ukrainian People's Republic, German and Austro-Hungarian occupation forces or forces loyal to the White movement.


title: Dnipro

text: On 5 December forces loyal to the Directorate issued an ultimatum to the Germans to leave the city. After another ultimatum on 19 December and four days of urban warfare German and Austro-Hungarian occupation forces left the city on 23 December 1918. From 20 November to 30 December 1918 Yekaterinoslav was controlled by the Directorate of the Ukrainian People's Republic.


title: Dnipro

text: On 25 December 1918, Directorate forces launched an open offensive against the Bolsheviks and forced them to retreat. On 26 December the Bolsheviks formed an alliance with the anarchist Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (the "Makhnovshchina)" to regain control of Yekaterinoslav. On 27 December the Makhnovshchina with a force of 600 insurgents took control of the city on behalf of the Bolsheviks, after four days of fighting to clear out the remaining forces loyal to the Ukrainian People's Republic. Because the Makhnovshchina held control of the city, the Bolsheviks abandoned their military positions and this allowed the Ukrainian People's Republic to gain control of the city. Many Makhnovshchina soldiers died. From 1 January until 26 January 1919 the Ukrainian People's Republic was able to keep the city under their control.


title: Dnipro

text: On 24 January 1919 Bolshevik Red Army troops commanded by Pavel Dybenko launched an offensive to capture Yekaterinoslav. Despite stubborn resistance of troops loyal to the Ukrainian People's Republic, on 27 January 1919 the city was in full control of the Red Army. On 11 May 1919 troops loyal to Nykyfor Hryhoriv, as part of the Hryhoriv Uprising, captured large parts of Yekaterinoslav. On 15 May Bolshevik troops had fully cleared the city of Hryhoriv's troops.


title: Dnipro

text: On 10 June 1919, after the anti-Bolshevik White movement Armed Forces of South Russia had gained control of the Donbas region located next to the city, the Bolsheviks decided to turn Yekaterinoslav into a fortified area. Despite this and fierce resistance, the Armed Forces of South Russia took control the city on 28 June 1919. The following days looting in the city became chronic. The Bolshevik Crimean Soviet Army, using a small flotilla on the Dnieper river, was briefly able to retake the city on 14 July 1919. In August 1919 the city was in an acute food crisis due to a peasant insurgency against the White movement policies. Twice, from 28 October to 6 November 1919 and from 9 November to 8 December 1919, Yekaterinoslav was captured by the Makhnovshchina.


title: Dnipro

text: On 29 December 1919 the Red Army again tried to control the city, and on 30 December 1919 they reestablished their control of Yekaterinoslav. On 20 September 1920 the Bolsheviks partly evacuated from the city due to it being threatened by the White movement South Russia's Northern Taurida Operation. This lasted for several days, until the situation at the front was determined as Yekaterinoslav not being in danger.


title: Dnipro

text: Due to years of fighting, 320 buildings in the city were destroyed, and most of the housing stock needed repair. In 1917 about 268,000 people lived in Yekaterinoslav. In 1920 this number had dropped to 189,000.


title: Dnipro

text: In late May 1920 the food supply to Yekaterinoslav deteriorated, resulting in a wave of strikes. In June 1920 Soviet authorities quelled one such protest by arresting 200 railway workers, of which 51 were sentenced to immediate execution.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1922 the region was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR, a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. In 1922 the Soviet government ordered that "all nationalized enterprises with names related to the Company or the Surname of the old owners must be renamed in memory of revolutionary events, in memory of the international, all-Russian or local leaders of the proletarian revolution." In 1922 and 1923 the factories were renamed, as well as dozens of streets, alleys, driveways, squares and parks. In 1923 the city council adopted a resolution to organize a competition to rename the city itself.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1924 a Provincial Congress of Soviets adopted a resolution on renaming the city of Yekaterinoslav to the city of Krasnodniprovsk (and Yekaterinoslav Province to Krasnodniprovsk). Following this, many organizations and institutions began to name Yekaterinoslav Krasnodniprovsk in official documents, only to be reminded in the press that the renaming of settlements could only be decided by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. In 1926 a provisional District Congress of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies adopted a resolution on renaming Yekaterinoslav to the name Dnipropetrovsk in honour of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets's chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, Grigory Petrovsky.


title: Dnipro

text: Petrovsky was present at this congress and he did "accept this honor with great gratitude." The resolution of the congress was approved by a resolution of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet dated 20 July 1926. In the 1920s and 1930s dozens of streets, alleys, driveways, squares and parks continued to be renamed in the city, this continued in the 1940s and in subsequent years.


title: Dnipro

text: By 1927 the industry of Dnipropetrovsk was completely rebuilt, and according to some indicators exceeded pre-war levels. Due to agrarian overpopulation, an influx of unemployed from other settlements, a higher birth rates among other reasons, both employment and unemployment in Dnipropetrovsk rose. In the late twenties, the authorities had to contend with growing labor unrest. "Do not strangle us, our children are dying of hunger, we have been placed in worse conditions than under the old regime" read one protest.


title: Dnipro

text: The city figured prominently in Stalin's Five-Year Plans for industrialisation. In 1932, Dnipropetrovsk's regional metallurgical plants produced 20 per cent of the entire cast iron and 25 per cent of the steel manufactured in the Ukrainian SSR. By the end of the thirties the Dnipropetrovsk region became the most urbanised of Soviet Ukraine with more than 2,273,000 people living in the region and over half a million in the city proper. Dnipropetrovsk became an important cultural and educational centre with ten colleges and a State University.


title: Dnipro

text: The surrounding countryside was devastated by the policy of forced collectivisation and grain seizures. Peasants had died en masse during the Holodomor of 1932–33. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in the years 1932–33 lost 3.5 to 9.8 million people. Making it one of the most affected areas of the famine.


title: Dnipro

text: Drawn by employment in the expanding heavy industry, the survivors changed the ethnic composition of the city. The percentage of residents recorded as Ukrainian rose from 36 percent of the population in 1926 to 54.6 percent in 1939. The Russian percentage fell from 31.6 to 23.4, and the Jewish share fell from 26.8 to 17.9. The city's population during the Interwar period grew rapidly. 368,000 people lived in Dnipropetrovsk in 1932. In the 1939 Soviet Census, this number had grown to more than half a million (500,662 people).


title: Dnipro

text: Soviet Ukrainization and Korenizatsiya were implemented in Dnipropetrovsk. The Communist party of Ukraine organized special courses in Ukrainian studies. Soviet authorities greatly increased the number of schools, and by the mid-1930s had eradicate illiteracy in the city. New universities were opened. At the end of the 1930s Dnipropetrovsk had 10 higher and 19 special educational institutions. In the 1930s a significant number of new secondary schools and hospitals were built in the city, and city parks were improved.


title: Dnipro

text: The Great Purge, following the Assassination of Sergei Kirov, also reached Dnipropetrovsk. In 1935 the Dnipropetrovsk NKVD arrested 182 "Trotskyists". In 1935, 235 alleged "internal enemies" were executed, including a few university rectors. In 1936, 526 people were executed. In 1937, the regional administration of the NKVD killed 16,421 people.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipropetrovsk was under Nazi occupation from 26 August 1941 to 25 October 1943. The city was administered as part of the "Reichskommissariat Ukraine." The Holocaust in Dnipropetrovsk reduced the city's remaining Jewish population, estimates for which range from 55,000 to 30,000, to just 702. In just two days, 13–14 October 1941, the Germans killed 15,000.


title: Dnipro

text: In a series of camps in the city ("Stammlager 348"), the occupiers are estimated to have killed upwards of 30,000 Soviet POWs.


title: Dnipro

text: In November 1941 Dnipropetrovsk's population was 233,000. In March 1942 this number had fallen to 178,000. On 25 October 1943 the population on the right-bank of the city numbered no more than 5,000. According to official statistics, in 1945 the population of Dnipropetrovsk had increased to 259,000 people.


title: Dnipro

text: As early as July 1944, the State Committee of Defence in Moscow decided to build a large military machine-building factory in Dnipropetrovsk on the location of the pre-war aircraft plant. In December 1945, thousands of German prisoners of war began construction and built the first sections and shops in the new factory. This was the foundation of the Dnipropetrovsk Automobile Factory. In 1954 the administration of this automobile factory opened a secret design office, designated OKB-586, to construct military missiles and rocket engines.


title: Dnipro

text: The high-security project was joined by hundreds of physicists, engineers and machine designers from Moscow and other large Soviet cities. In 1965, the secret Plant No. 586 was transferred to the USSR Ministry of General Machine-Building which renamed it "the Southern Machine-building Factory" (Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel'nyi zavod) or in abbreviated Russian, simply Yuzhmash. Yuzhmash became a significant factor in the arms race of the Cold War (Nikita Khrushchev boasted in 1960 that it was producing rockets "like sausages" ).


title: Dnipro

text: In 1959, Dnipropetrovsk was officially closed to foreign visitors. No foreign citizen, even of a socialist state, was allowed to visit the city or district. Its citizens were held by Communist authorities to a higher standard of ideological purity than the rest of the population, and their freedom of movement was severely restricted. It was not until 1987, during perestroika, that Dnipropetrovsk was opened to international visitors and civil restrictions were lifted.


title: Dnipro

text: Notwithstanding the high-security regime, in September and October 1972, workers downed tools in several factories in Dnipropetrovsk demanding higher wages, better food and living conditions, and the right to choose one's job. Labor miiltancy returned in the late 1980s, a period in which promises of Perestrioka and Glasnost raised popular expectations. In 1990 two thousand inmates rioted in the women's remand prison in a further of sign of growing unrest.


title: Dnipro

text: In 1959 17.4% of Dnipropetrovsk students were taught in Ukrainian language schools and 82.6% in Russian language schools. 58% of the city's inhabitants self-identified as Ukrainians. Compared with the other 3 biggest cities of Ukraine Dnipropetrovsk had a rather large share of education conducted in Ukrainian. In Kyiv 26.8% of pupils studied in Ukrainian and 73.1% in Russian while 66% of Kyiv residents considered themselves Ukrainian, in Kharkiv these numbers were 4.9%, 95.1% and 49%. In Odesa these numbers were 8.1%, 91.9% and 40%.


title: Dnipro

text: As in the overall Ukrainian SSR, Dnipropetrovsk saw an influx of young immigrants from rural Ukraine. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast saw the highest inflow of rural youth of all Ukraine.


title: Dnipro

text: According to KGB reports, in the 1960s "Samizdat" and Ukrainian diaspora publications began to circulate via Western Ukraine in Dnipropetrovsk. These fed into underground student circles where they promoted interest in the "Ukrainian Sixtiers", in Ukrainian history, especially of Ukrainian Cossacks, and in the revival of the Ukrainian language. Occasionally the blue and yellow flag of independent Ukraine was unfurled in protest. The authorities responded with repression: arresting and jailing members of underground discussion groups for "nationalistic propaganda".


title: Dnipro

text: The growing evidence of dissent in the city coincided from the late 1960s with what the KGB referred to as "radio hooliganism". Thousands of high-school and college students had become ham radio enthusiasts, recording and rebroadcasting western popular music. Annual KGB reports regularly drew a connection between enthusiasm for western pop culture and anti-Soviet behavior. In the 1980s, by which time the KGB had conceded that their raids against "hippies" had failed suppress the youth rebellion, such behavior was reportedly found in an admixture of Anglo-American" heavy metal, punk rock and Banderism—the veneration of Stepan Bandera, and of other Ukrainian nationalists, who in the Soviet narrative were denounced and discredited as Nazi collaborators.


title: Dnipro

text: In an attempt to provide Dnipropetrovsk youth with an ideologically safe alternative, beginning in 1976 the local Komsomol set up approved discoteques. Some of the activists involved in this "disco movement" went on in the 1980s to engage in their own illicit tourist and music enterprises, and several later became influential figures in Ukrainian national politics, among them Yulia Tymoshenko, Victor Pinchuk, Serhiy Tihipko, Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Oleksandr Turchynov.


title: Dnipro

text: Reflecting Dnipropetrovsk's special strategic importance for the entire Soviet Union, party cadres from the "rocket city" played an outsized role not only in republican leaderhip in Kyiv, but also in the Union leadership in Moscow. During Stalin's Great Purge, Leonid Brezhnev rose rapidly within the ranks of the local "nomenklatura," from director of the Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Institute in 1936 to regional (Obkom) Party Secretary in charge of the city's defense industries in 1939.


title: Dnipro

text: Here, he took the first steps toward building a network of supporters which came to be known as the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia". They spearheaded the internal party coup that in 1964 saw Brezhnev replace Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and call a halt to further reform.


title: Dnipro

text: In a national referendum on 1 December 1991, 90.36% of Dnipropetrovsk's voters approved the declaration of independence that had been made by the Ukrainian parliament on 24 August. Amidst the economic dislocation and soaring inflation that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union, output declined. Although its economic contraction was at a rate below the national average, the Dnipropetrovsk city and oblast witnessed one of the largest population declines of all the regions of Ukraine. By 2021, the city's population, which had stood at over 1.2 million in 1991, had been reduced to 981,000. Young people from Dnipropetrovsk were among the millions of Ukrainians who left the country to find work and opportunity abroad.


title: Dnipro

text: The continuation into the new century of the chaotic fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union was symbolized for many in Dnipropetrovsk by two violent episodes. In June and July 2007, Dnipropetrovsk experienced a wave of random video-recorded serial killings that were dubbed by the media as the work of the "Dnipropetrovsk maniacs". In February 2009, three youths were sentenced for their part in 21 murders, and numerous other attacks and robberies. On 27 April 2012, four bombs exploded near four tram stations in Dnipropetrovsk, injuring 27 people. No one was convicted. Opposition politicians claimed to see the hand of President Viktor Yanukovych intent on disrupting the October 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election and installing a presidential regime.


title: Dnipro

text: On 26 January 2014, 3,000 anti-Viktor Yanukovych (Ukrainian President) and pro-Euromaidan activists attempted but failed to capture the Regional State Administration building. There were street disturbances and Euromaidan protesters were reported to be beaten up by paid pro-Yanukovych supporters (the so-called "Titushky"). Dnipropetrovsk Governor Kolesnikov called them "extreme radical thugs from other regions".


title: Dnipro

text: Two days later about 2,000 public sector employees called an indefinite rally in support of the Yanukovych government. Meanwhile, the government building was reinforced with barbed wire. On 19 February 2014 there was an anti-Yanukovych picket near the Regional State Administration. On 22 February 2014, after a further anti-Yanukovych demonstration, Dnipropetrovsk Mayor Ivan Kulichenko, for the sake of "peace in the city" left Yanukovych's Party of Regions.


title: Dnipro

text: Simultaneously the Dnipropetrovsk City Council vowed to support "the preservation of Ukraine as a single and indivisible state", although some members had called for separatism and for federalization of Ukraine. On the same day, after street fighting in Kyiv, 22 February 2014, Yanukovych left Ukraine and went into Russian exile.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipropetrovsk remained relatively quiet during the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, with pro-Russian Federation protestors outnumbered by those opposing outside intervention. In March 2014 the city's Lenin Square was renamed "Heroes of Independence Square" in honor of the people killed during Euromaidan. The statue of Lenin on the square was removed. In June 2014 another Lenin monument was removed and replaced by a monument to the Ukrainian military fighting the Russo-Ukrainian War.


title: Dnipro

text: To comply with the 2015 decommunization law the city was renamed "Dnipro" in May 2016, after the river that flows through the city. By summer 2016 not only was the city was renamed, but so were more than 350 streets, alleys, driveways, squares and parks. For example, Karl Marx Avenue, the main street, was renamed Yavornytskyi Avenue in honour of the once neglected city and cossack historian. This was 12 percent of all of the city's toponymies. Five of the eight urban districts of the city received new names.


title: Dnipro

text: In the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and with developing military fronts near Kyiv and to the north, east and south, Dnipro has become a logistical hub for humanitarian aid and a reception point for people fleeing the war. Roughly equidistant from most of the war's major battlegrounds — Donetsk, Mariupol, Kherson and Kharkiv are all within — the city's location is proving critical for supplying the Ukrainian defence effort. At the same time, its control of a Dnieper River crossing and the opportunity it would provide to cut off Ukrainian forces in the Donbas makes the city a high-value target for the Russians.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro is reported as the only city in Ukraine where a volunteer formation has been created under direct City Council control. It is called the "Dnieper Guard" (Варти Дніпра, Varty Dnipra). The Mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov has dismissed suggestions that the group remained Ihor Kolomoyskyi's "private army". Kolomoyskyi has helped with some equipment purchases, but the force performs defence and law and order functions under the leadership of the national police.


title: Dnipro

text: The Russians first hit Dnipro on 11 March. Three air strikes close to a kindergarten and an apartment building killed at least one person. On 15 March, Russian missiles hit Dnipro International Airport, destroying the runway and damaging the terminal. In the early hours of 6 April, an air strike destroyed an oil depot. On 10 April, a Ukrainian government spokesperson said that the airport in Dnipro had been "completely destroyed" as the result of a Russian attack. On 15 July, a Russian missile attack killed four people and injured sixteen others in Dnipro.


title: Dnipro

text: As part of the derussification campaign that swept through Ukraine following the February 2022 invasion 110 toponyms in the city were "de-Russified" from February to September 2022. The renaming started on 21 April when 31 streets connected to Russia were renamed. In May another 20 streets were renamed, followed by 21 more streets and alleys in June 2022. According to Dnipro's Mayor Borys Filatov (speaking on 21 September 2022) "this is not the end." Among other renamings, the Schmidt Street (the street was originally the Gymnasium Street but it was renamed to Otto Schmidt Street by Soviet authorities in 1934) in the center of Dnipro was renamed to Stepan Bandera Street. In May 2022 (also) several outdoor objects related to the USSR were dismantled in Dnipro.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro was hit during the autumn 2022 Russian missile strikes on critical infrastructure. On 10 October three civilians were killed. On 18 October 2022 Russian missile strikes targeted the energy infrastructure of Dnipro. On 17 November 2022 23 people were injured.


title: Dnipro

text: In December 2022 Dnipro removed from the city all monuments to figures of Russian culture and history.


title: Dnipro

text: The City of Dnipro is governed by the Dnipro City Council. It is a city municipality that is designated as a separate district within its oblast.


title: Dnipro

text: Administratively, the city is divided into "districts in city" ("raiony v misti"). Presently, there are 8 of them. Aviatorske, an urban-type settlement located near the Dnipro International Airport, is also a part of Dnipro Municipality.


title: Dnipro

text: The City Council Assembly makes up the administration's legislative branch, thus effectively making it a city 'parliament' or rada. The municipal council is made up of 12 elected members, who are each elected to represent a certain district of the city for a four-year term. The council has 29 standing commissions which play an important role in the oversight of the city and its merchants.


title: Dnipro

text: Until 18 July 2020, Dnipro was incorporated as a city of oblast significance, the centre of Dnipro Municipality and extraterritorial administrative centre of Dnipro Raion. The municipality was abolished in July 2020 as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to seven. The area of Dnipro Municipality was merged into Dnipro Raion.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro is also the seat of the oblast's local administration controlled by the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Rada. The Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is appointed by the President of Ukraine.


title: Dnipro

text: Five of the eight city districts were renamed late November 2015 to comply with decommunization laws.


title: Dnipro

text: In the first decades of Ukrainian independence the city's voters generally favoured the proponents of continued close ties to Russia: in the 1990s the Communist Party of Ukraine, and in the new century, the Party of Regions. After the 2014 events of Euromaidan, which included demonstrations and clashes in the central city, the Party of Regions ceded influence to those parties and independents calling for closer ties to the European Union.


title: Dnipro

text: As in Soviet Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk was disproportionately represented among political leaders in Kyiv. The principal representatives of the so-called "Dnipropetrovsk Faction" in the capital were Ukraine's second president Leonid Kuchma and Ukraine's 10th and 13th prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Kuchma was a former senior manager of Yuzhmash while Tymoshenko was president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, a Dnipropetrovsk-based private company that from 1995 to 1997 was the main importer of Russian natural gas to Ukraine.


title: Dnipro

text: Kuchma's 1994 presidential campaign had been financed by Dnipropetrovsk businessmen Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Gennadiy Bogolyubov. Kolomoyskyi and Bogolyubov were partners in Privat Group, a scandal-ridden financial-industrial conglomerate. As prime Minister, Kuchma had granted their "PrivatBank" the unique priviege of opening overseas branches. These were later implicated in the wholesale defrauding of Ukrainian depositors, leading to the bank's nationalization in 2016. Kuchma was also closely tied to another budding Dnipropetrovsk billionaire, his son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk whose assets included several giant steel and pipe plants in the region and the bank "Kredit-Dnepr".


title: Dnipro

text: With Viktor Yushchenko, Tymoshenko co-led the Orange Revolution which annulled the declared vidtory of Viktor Yanukovych in the 2004 presidential election, and under President Yuschenko served as prime minister from 24 January to 8 September 2005, and again from 18 December 2007 to 4 March 2010. Yanukovych narrowly defeated Tymoshenko the 2010 presidential election, taking 41.7 percent of the vote in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The candidates accused one another of vote rigging.


title: Dnipro

text: In the October 2012 Ukrainian parliamentary election Yanukovych's Party of Regions, which promoted itself as the champion of the language rights and industrial interests of largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, won 35.8 percent of the vote in the Dnipropetrovsk region, compared to 18.4 percent for Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party and 19.4 percent for the Communists. Tymoshenko mounted a hunger strike to once again protest election irregularities.


title: Dnipro

text: On 2 March 2014, following the removal of Yanukovich as President, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov appointed Ihor Kolomoyskyi Governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Kolomoyskyi initially dismissed suggestions of Russian-backed separatism in Dnipropetrovsk, but then took vigorous measures. He posted bounties for the capture of Russian-backed militants and the surrender of weapons; drafted housands of Privat Group employees as auxiliary police officers; and is said to have provided substantial funds to create the Dnipro Battalion, and to support the Aidar, Azov, and Donbas volunteer battalions.


title: Dnipro

text: In the Dnipropetrovsk region, Petro Poroshenko won the May 2014 presidential election with 45 per cent, but in the 2014 parliamentary election in October his political party Petro Poroshenko Bloc secured 19.4 percent of the vote, 5 points behind the Opposition Bloc, the successor to the disbanded Party of Regions.


title: Dnipro

text: On 25 March 2015, following a struggle with Kolomoyskyi for control the state-owned oil pipeline operator, President Poroshenko replaced Kolomoyskyi as governor with Valentyn Reznichenko.


title: Dnipro

text: In the 2015 Ukrainian local elections Borys Filatov of the patriotic UKROP was elected Mayor of Dnipro.


title: Dnipro

text: In the March–April 2019 Ukrainian presidential election Dnipro voted overwhelmingly voted for the successful candidate, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who advocated memberhsip of European Union. In the parliamentary election in October, his Servant of the People party swept the board, winning each of Dnipro's five single-mandate parliamentary constituencies.


title: Dnipro

text: By the time of the October 2020 Ukrainian local elections, support for Zelenskyy's party had collapsed: it won just 8.7 percent of the vote for the city council. The Euromaidan trajectory was represented instead by Filatov's Proposition (the "Party of Mayors"), with 60 percent of the popular vote against 30 percent for the pro-Russian the Opposition Platform – For Life.


title: Dnipro

text: The city is built mainly upon both banks of the Dnieper, at its confluence with the Samara River. In the loop of a major meander, the Dnieper changes its course from the north west to continue southerly and later south-westerly through Ukraine, ultimately passing Kherson, where it finally flows into the Black Sea.


title: Dnipro

text: Nowadays both the north and south banks play home to a range of industrial enterprises and manufacturing plants. The airport is located about south-east of the city.


title: Dnipro

text: The centre of the city is constructed on the right bank which is part of the Dnieper Upland, while the left bank is part of the Dnieper Lowland. The old town is situated atop a hill that is formed as a result of the river's change of course to the south. The change of river's direction is caused by its proximity to the Azov Upland located southeast of the city.


title: Dnipro

text: One of the city's streets, Akademik Yavornitskyi Prospekt, links the two major architectural ensembles of the city and constitutes an important thoroughfare through the centre, which along with various suburban radial road systems, provides some of the area's most vital transport links for both suburban and inter-urban travel.


title: Dnipro

text: Under the Köppen–Geiger climate classification system, Dnipro has a humid continental climate ("Dfa/Dfb"). Snowfall is more common in the hills than at the city's lower elevations. The city has four distinct seasons: a cold, snowy winter; a hot summer; and two relatively wet transition periods. However, according to other schemes (such as the Salvador Rivas-Martínez bioclimatic one), Dnipro has a Supratemperate bioclimate, and belongs to the Temperate xeric steppic thermoclimatic belt, due to high evapotranspiration.


title: Dnipro

text: During the summer, Dnipro is very warm (average day temperature in July is , even hot sometimes ). Temperatures as high as have been recorded in May. Winter is not so cold (average day temperature in January is , but when there is no snow and the wind blows hard, it feels extremely cold. A mix of snow and rain happens usually in December.


title: Dnipro

text: The best time for visiting the city is in late spring (late April and May), and early in autumn: September, October, when the city's trees turn yellow. Other times are mainly dry with a few showers.


title: Dnipro

text: "However, the city is characterized with significant pollution of air with industrial emissions." The "severely polluted air and water" and allegedly "vast areas of decimated landscape" of Dnipro and Donetsk are considered by some to be an environmental crisis. Though exactly where in Dnipropetrovsk these areas might be found is not stated.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro is a primarily industrial city of around one million people. It has developed into a large urban centre over the past few centuries to become, today, Ukraine's fourth-largest city after Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Stalinist architecture (monumental soviet classicism) dominates in the city centre.


title: Dnipro

text: Immediately after its foundation, Dnipro, or as it was then known Yekaterinoslav, began to develop exclusively on the right bank of the Dnieper River. At first the city developed radially from the central point provided by the Transfiguration Cathedral, completed in 1835. Neoclassical structures of brick and stone construction were preferred and the city began to take on the appearance of a typical European city of the era. Many of these buildings have been retained in the city's older Sobornyi District. Amongst the most important buildings of this era are the Transfiguration Cathedral, and a number of buildings in the area surrounding Akademik Yavornitskyi Prospekt, including the Khrennikov House.


title: Dnipro

text: Over the next few decades, until the final end of the Russian Empire with the October Revolution in 1917, the city did not change much in appearance. The predominant architectural style remained neo-classicism. Notable buildings built in the era before 1917 include the main building of the Dnipro Polytechnic, which was built in 1899–1901, the art-nouveau inspired building of the city's former Duma (parliament), the Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum, and the Mechnikov Regional Hospital. Other buildings of the era that did not fit the typical architectural style of the time in Dnipropetrovsk include, the Ukrainian-influenced Grand Hotel Ukraine, the Russian revivalist style railway station (since reconstructed), and the art-nouveau Astoriya building on Akademik Yavornitskyi Prospekt.


title: Dnipro

text: Once Yekaterinoslav became part of the Soviet Union (officially in 1922), and became Dnipropetrovsk in 1926, the city was gradually purged of tsarist-era monuments. Monumental architecture was stripped of Imperial coats of arms and other non-socialist symbolism. Following the 1917 October Revolution, a monument to Catherine the Great that stood in front of the Mining Institute was replaced with one of Russian academic Mikhail Lomonosov.


title: Dnipro

text: Later, due to damage from World War II, badly damaged buildings were, more often than not, demolished completely and replaced with new structures. This is one of the main reasons why much of Dnipro's central avenue, Akademik Yavornitskyi Prospekt (formerly Karl Marx Prospect), is designed in the style of Stalinist Social Realism. A number of large buildings were reconstructed. The main railway station, for example, was stripped of its Russian-revival ornamentation and redesigned in the style of Stalinist social-realism.


title: Dnipro

text: The Grand Hotel Ukraine survived the war but was later simplified much in design, with its roof being reconstructed in a typical French mansard style as opposed to the ornamental Ukrainian baroque of the pre-war era. Many pre-revolution buildings were reconstructed to suit new purposes. For example, the Emperor Nicholas II Commercial Institute in the city was reconstructed to serve as the administrative centre for the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a function it fulfils to this day. Other buildings, such as the Potemkin Palace were given over to "the proletariat" (the working man), in this case as the students' union of the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University.


title: Dnipro

text: After the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the appointment of Nikita Khrushchev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the industrialisation of Dnipropetrovsk became even more profound, with the Southern (Yuzhne) Missile and Rocket factory being set up in the city. However, this was not the only development and many other factories, especially metallurgical and heavy-manufacturing plants, were set up in the city.


title: Dnipro

text: As a result of all this industrialisation the city's inner suburbs became increasingly polluted and were gradually given over to large, industrial enterprises. At the same time the extensive development of the city's left bank and western suburbs as new residential areas began. The low-rise tenant houses of the Khrushchev era (Khrushchyovkas) gave way to the construction of high-rise prefabricated apartment blocks (similar to German Plattenbaus). In 1976, in line with the city's 1926 renaming, a large monumental statue of Grigoriy Petrovsky was placed on the square in front of the city's station. This statue was destroyed by an angry mob in early 2016.


title: Dnipro

text: Since the independence of Ukraine in 1991 and the economic development that followed, a number of large commercial and business centres have been built in the city's outskirts. To this day the city is characterised by its mix of architectural styles, with much of the city's centre consisting of pre-revolutionary buildings in a variety of styles, stalinist buildings and constructivist architecture, whilst residential districts are, more often than not, made up of aesthetically simple, technically outdated mid-rise and high-rise housing stock from the Soviet era. Despite this, the city has a large number of 'private sectors' where the tradition of building and maintaining individual detached housing has continued to this day.


title: Dnipro

text: In late November 2015 about 300 streets, 5 of the 8 city districts and one metro station were renamed to comply with decommunization laws. As part of the derussification campaign that swept through Ukraine following the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, 110 toponyms in the city were renamed from February to September 2022. On 3 May 2022 alone more than a dozen memorials erected during Soviet times were dismantled. In December 2022 the Dnipro communal services (in accordance a decision of the City Council) removed from the city all monuments to figures of Russian culture and history. This this meant that monuments to Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Matrosov, Volodia Dubinin, Maxim Gorky, Valery Chkalov, and Mikhail Lomonosov were removed from the public space of the city. On 16 November 2022 Pushkin Avenue in Dnipro had been renamed Lesya Ukrainka Avenue.


title: Dnipro

text: The population of the city is about 1 million people. In 2011, the average age of the city's resident population was 40 years. The number of males declined slightly more than the number of females. The natural population growth in Dnipro is slightly higher than growth in Ukraine in general.


title: Dnipro

text: Between 1923 and 1933 the Ukrainian proportion of the population of Dnipropetrovsk increased from 16% to 48%. This was part of a national trend.


title: Dnipro

text: In a survey in June–July 2017, 9% of residents said that they spoke Ukrainian at home, 63% spoke Russian, and 25% spoke Ukrainian and Russian equally.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro is a major industrial centre of Ukraine. It has several facilities devoted to heavy industry that produce a wide range of products, including cast-iron, launch vehicles, rolled metal, pipes, machinery, different mining combines, agricultural equipment, tractors, trolleybuses, refrigerators, different chemicals and many others. The most famous and the oldest (founded in the 19th century) is the Dniprovsky Metallurgical Plant (from 1922 until the time of decommunization in Ukraine, the plant was named after the Soviet Union statesman Grigory Petrovsky).


title: Dnipro

text: Metals and metallurgy is the city's core industry in terms of output. Employment in the city is concentrated in large-sized enterprises. Metallurgical enterprises are based in the city and account for over 47% of its industrial output. These enterprises are important contributors to the city's budget and, with 80% of their output being exported, to Ukraine's foreign exchange reserve. Dnipro serves as the main import hub for foreign goods coming into the oblast and, on average, accounted for 58% of the oblast's imports between 2005 and 2011. With economic conditions improving even further in 2010 and 2011, registered unemployment fell to about 4,100 by the end of 2011.


title: Dnipro

text: The city of Dnipro's economy is dominated by the wholesale and retail trade sector, which accounted for 53% of the output of non-financial enterprises in 2010.


title: Dnipro

text: Entrepreneur Ihor Kolomoyskyi's Privat Group, a global business group, is based in the city and grouped around the Privatbank. Privat Group controls thousands of companies of virtually every industry in Ukraine, European Union, Georgia, Ghana, Russia, Romania, United States and other countries. Steel, oil & gas, chemical and energy are sectors of the group's prime influence and expertise. Privat Group is in business conflict with the Interpipe, also based in Dnipro area. The influential metallurgical mill company founded and mostly owned by the local business oligarch Viktor Pinchuk.


title: Dnipro

text: Another company headquartered in Dnipro is ATB-Market. This company owns the largest national network of retail shops.


title: Dnipro

text: None of the group's capital is publicly traded on the stock exchange. Group's founding owners are natives of Dnipro and made their entire career here. Privatbank, the core of the group, is the largest commercial bank in Ukraine. In March 2014 was named by the American review magazine "Global Finance" as "the Best Bank in Ukraine for 2014" while British magazine "The Banker" in November 2013 named again the same bank as "the Bank of the year 2013 in Ukraine".


title: Dnipro

text: In 2018 a private Texas-based aerospace firm Firefly Aerospace opened a Research and Development (R&D) center in Dnipro to develop small and medium-sized launch vehicles for commercial launches to orbit.


title: Dnipro

text: The main forms of public transport used in Dnipro are trams, buses and electric trolley buses. In addition to this there are a large number of taxi firms operating in the city, and many residents have private cars.


title: Dnipro

text: The city's municipal roads also suffer from the same funding problems as the trams, with many of them in a very poor technical state. It is not uncommon to find very large potholes and crumbling surfaces on many of Dnipro's smaller roads. Major roads and highways are of better quality. In the early 2010s the situation was improving, with a number of new used trams bought from the German cities of Dresden and Magdeburg, and a number of roads, including Schmidt Street (now Stepan Bandera Street) and Moskovsky Street (now Volodymyr Monomakh Street) were being reconstructed with modern road-building techniques.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro also has a metro system, opened in 1995, which consists of one line and 6 stations. The 1980 official plans for four different lines were never made reality. In 2011 the metro was transferred to municipal ownership in the hope that this will help it secure a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In 2011, plans envisioned an expansion of three station, , and , to be completed by 2015. The opening of these three stations have been repeatedly delayed and they will not open until 2024 at the earliest. The extension will increase the number of stations to nine, which would extend the line 4 km to a total of 11.8 km (7.3-mile).


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro has some highways crossing through the city. The most popular routes are from Kyiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Transit through the city is also available. the city is also seeing construction of a southern urban bypass, which will allow automobile traffic to proceed around the city centre. This is expected to both improve air quality and reduce transport issues from heavy freight lorries that pass through the city centre.


title: Dnipro

text: The largest bus station in eastern Ukraine is located in Dnipro, from where bus routes are available to all over the country, including some international routes to Poland, Germany, Moldova and Turkey. It is located near the city's central railway station. Since the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine Ukraine’s border crossings with Russia and Belarus are closed to regular traffic.


title: Dnipro

text: In the summertime, there are some routes available by hydrofoils on the Dnieper River, whilst various tourist ships on their way down the river, (Kyiv–Kherson–Odesa) tend to make a stop in the city. Dnipro's river port is located close to the area surrounding the central railway station, on the banks of the river.


title: Dnipro

text: The city is a large railway junction, with many daily trains running to and from Eastern Europe and on domestic routes within Ukraine.


title: Dnipro

text: There are two railway terminals, Dnipro Holovnyi (main station) and Dnipro Lotsmanska (south station).


title: Dnipro

text: Two express passenger services run each day between Kyiv and Dnipro under the name 'Capital Express'. Other daytime services include suburban trains to towns and villages in the surrounding Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Most long-distance trains tend to run at night to reduce the amount of daytime hours spent travelling by each passenger.


title: Dnipro

text: Domestic connections exist between Dnipro and Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk, Truskavets, Kharkiv and many other smaller Ukrainian cities, whilst international destinations include, amongst others the Bulgarian seaside resort of Varna. Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine all railway connection between Ukraine and Belarus were axed. Meaning that the pre-war international destinations to Minsk in Belarus, Moscow's Kursky Station and Saint Petersburg's Vitebsky Station in Russia and Baku—the capital of Azerbaijan—are no longer in service.


title: Dnipro

text: The city is served by Dnipro International Airport and is connected to European and Middle Eastern cities with daily flights. It is located southeast from the city center. A Russian attack on 10 April 2022 completely destroyed the airport and the infrastructure nearby.


title: Dnipro

text: The city has a river port located on the left bank of the Dnieper. There is also a railroad freight station.


title: Dnipro

text: There are 163 educational institutions among them schools, gymnasiums and boarding schools. For children of pre-school age there are 174 institutions, also a lot of out-of -school institutions such as center of out-of-school work. Eighty-seven institutions that are recognized on all Ukrainian and regional levels.


title: Dnipro

text: In 2006 Dnipropetrovsk hosted the All-Ukrainian Olympiad in Information Technology; in 2008, that for Mathematics, and in 2009 the semi-final of the All-Ukrainian Olympiad in Programming for the Eastern Region. In the same year as the latter took place, the youth group 'Eksperiment', an organisation promoting increased cultural awareness amongst Ukrainians, was founded in the city.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro is a major educational centre in Ukraine and is home to two of Ukraine's top-ten universities; the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University and Dnipro Polytechnic National Technical University.


title: Dnipro

text: The system of high education institutions connects 38 institutions in Dnipro, among them 14 of IV and ІІІ levels of accreditation, and 22 of І and ІІ levels of accreditation. In year 2012 National Mining Institute was on the 7th and National University named after O. Honchar was on the 9th place among the best high education institutions in "TOP-200 Ukraine" list.


title: Dnipro

text: The list below is a list of all current state-organised higher educational institutions (not included are non-independent subdivisions of other universities not based in Dnipro).


title: Dnipro

text: In the 21st century annually around 55,000 students studied in Dnipro, a significant number of whom students from abroad.


title: Dnipro

text: Dnipro has a variety of theatres (plus an Opera) and museums, including the Dmytro Yavornytsky National Historical Museum. There are also several parks, restaurants and beaches.


title: Dnipro

text: The major streets of the city were renamed in honour of Marxist heroes during the Soviet era. Following the 2015 law on decommunization these have been renamed.


title: Dnipro

text: The central thoroughfare is known as Akademik Yavornytskyi Prospekt, a wide and long boulevard that stretches east to west through the centre of the city. It was founded in the 18th century and parts of its buildings are the actual decoration of the city. In the heart of the city is Soborna Square, which includes the Transfiguration Cathedral founded by order of Catherine the Great in 1787. On the square, there are some remarkable buildings: the Museum of History, Diorama "Battle for the Dnipro River (World War II)."


title: Dnipro

text: Further from the city centre and next to the Dnieper River (spelled "Dnipro" in Ukrainian) is the large Taras Shevchenko Park (which is on the right bank of the river) and Monastyrskyi Island. In the 9th century, Byzantine monks based a monastery here.


title: Dnipro

text: A few areas retain their historical character: all of Central Avenue, some street-blocks on the main hill (the Nagorna part) between Pushkin Prospekt and Embankment, and sections near Globa (formerly known as Chkalov park until it was renamed) and Shevchenko parks have been untouched for 150 years.


title: Dnipro

text: The river keeps the climate mild. It is visible from many points in Dnipro. From any of the three hills in the city, one can see a view of the river, islands, parks, outskirts, river banks and other hills.


title: Dnipro

text: There was no need to build skyscrapers in the city in Soviet times. The major industries preferred to locate their offices close to their factories and away from the centre of town. Most new office buildings are built in the same architectural style as the old buildings. A number, however, display more modern aesthetics, and some blend the two styles.


title: Dnipro

text: FC Dnipro is the most successful football club of the city. It is a former second runner-up in the Ukrainian Premier League and in the UEFA Cup it reached and lost the 2015 UEFA Europa League Final. It also was the only Soviet team to win the USSR Federation Cup twice. The club was owned by the Privat Group. The club has been inactive since 2019. Note: A bandy team, a basketball team and others use the same name.


title: Dnipro

text: Other local football include: FC Lokomotyv Dnipropetrovsk and FC Spartak Dnipropetrovsk, both of which have large fan bases. SC Dnipro-1 is another team emerged in 2017. SC Dnipro-1 established itself as the most successful club in town; playing in the Ukrainian Premier League, the UEFA Europa League and the UEFA Europa Conference League.


title: Dnipro

text: In 2008 the city built a new soccer stadium; the Dnipro-Arena has a capacity of 31,003 people and was built as a replacement for Dnipro's old stadium, Stadium Meteor. The Dnipro-Arena hosted the 2010 FIFA World Cup qualification game between Ukraine and England on 10 October 2009. The Dnipro Arena was initially chosen as one of the Ukrainian venues for their joint Euro 2012 bid with Poland. However, it was dropped from the list in May 2009 as the capacity fell short of the minimum 33,000 seats required by UEFA. The city is home to BC Dnipro, champion of the 2019–20 Ukrainian Basketball SuperLeague. The team plays its home games at the "Palace of Sports Shynnik".


title: Dnipro

text: The city is the centre of Ukrainian bandy. The Ukrainian Federation of Bandy and Rink-Bandy has its office in the city. The foremost local bandy club is Dnipro, which won the Ukrainian championship in 2014.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nuclear fission is passed to a working fluid (water or gas), which in turn runs through steam turbines. These either drive a ship's propellers or turn electrical generators' shafts. Nuclear generated steam in principle can be used for industrial process heat or for district heating. Some reactors are used to produce isotopes for medical and industrial use, or for production of weapons-grade plutonium. , the International Atomic Energy Agency reports there are 422 nuclear power reactors and 223 nuclear research reactors in operation around the world.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In the early era of nuclear reactors (1940s), a reactor was known as a nuclear pile or atomic pile (so-called because the graphite moderator blocks of the first reactor were placed into a tall pile).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Just as conventional thermal power stations generate electricity by harnessing the thermal energy released from burning fossil fuels, nuclear reactors convert the energy released by controlled nuclear fission into thermal energy for further conversion to mechanical or electrical forms.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: When a large fissile atomic nucleus such as uranium-235, Uranium-233 or plutonium-239 absorbs a neutron, it may undergo nuclear fission. The heavy nucleus splits into two or more lighter nuclei, (the fission products), releasing kinetic energy, gamma radiation, and free neutrons. A portion of these neutrons may be absorbed by other fissile atoms and trigger further fission events, which release more neutrons, and so on. This is known as a nuclear chain reaction.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: To control such a nuclear chain reaction, control rods containing neutron poisons and neutron moderators can change the portion of neutrons that will go on to cause more fission. Nuclear reactors generally have automatic and manual systems to shut the fission reaction down if monitoring or instrumentation detects unsafe conditions.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: A kilogram of uranium-235 (U-235) converted via nuclear processes releases approximately three million times more energy than a kilogram of coal burned conventionally (7.2 × 10 joules per kilogram of uranium-235 versus 2.4 × 10 joules per kilogram of coal).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The fission of one kilogram of uranium-235 releases about 19 billion kilocalories, so the energy released by 1 kg of uranium-235 corresponds to that released by burning 2.7 million kg of coal.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: A nuclear reactor coolant – usually water but sometimes a gas or a liquid metal (like liquid sodium or lead) or molten salt – is circulated past the reactor core to absorb the heat that it generates. The heat is carried away from the reactor and is then used to generate steam. Most reactor systems employ a cooling system that is physically separated from the water that will be boiled to produce pressurized steam for the turbines, like the pressurized water reactor. However, in some reactors the water for the steam turbines is boiled directly by the reactor core; for example the boiling water reactor.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The rate of fission reactions within a reactor core can be adjusted by controlling the quantity of neutrons that are able to induce further fission events. Nuclear reactors typically employ several methods of neutron control to adjust the reactor's power output. Some of these methods arise naturally from the physics of radioactive decay and are simply accounted for during the reactor's operation, while others are mechanisms engineered into the reactor design for a distinct purpose.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The fastest method for adjusting levels of fission-inducing neutrons in a reactor is via movement of the control rods. Control rods are made of neutron poisons and therefore absorb neutrons. When a control rod is inserted deeper into the reactor, it absorbs more neutrons than the material it displaces – often the moderator. This action results in fewer neutrons available to cause fission and reduces the reactor's power output. Conversely, extracting the control rod will result in an increase in the rate of fission events and an increase in power.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The physics of radioactive decay also affects neutron populations in a reactor. One such process is delayed neutron emission by a number of neutron-rich fission isotopes. These delayed neutrons account for about 0.65% of the total neutrons produced in fission, with the remainder (termed "prompt neutrons") released immediately upon fission. The fission products which produce delayed neutrons have half-lives for their decay by neutron emission that range from milliseconds to as long as several minutes, and so considerable time is required to determine exactly when a reactor reaches the critical point. Keeping the reactor in the zone of chain reactivity where delayed neutrons are "necessary" to achieve a critical mass state allows mechanical devices or human operators to control a chain reaction in "real time"; otherwise the time between achievement of criticality and nuclear meltdown as a result of an exponential power surge from the normal nuclear chain reaction, would be too short to allow for intervention. This last stage, where delayed neutrons are no longer required to maintain criticality, is known as the prompt critical point. There is a scale for describing criticality in numerical form, in which bare criticality is known as "zero dollars" and the prompt critical point is "one dollar", and other points in the process interpolated in cents.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In some reactors, the coolant also acts as a neutron moderator. A moderator increases the power of the reactor by causing the fast neutrons that are released from fission to lose energy and become thermal neutrons. Thermal neutrons are more likely than fast neutrons to cause fission. If the coolant is a moderator, then temperature changes can affect the density of the coolant/moderator and therefore change power output. A higher temperature coolant would be less dense, and therefore a less effective moderator.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In other reactors the coolant acts as a poison by absorbing neutrons in the same way that the control rods do. In these reactors power output can be increased by heating the coolant, which makes it a less dense poison. Nuclear reactors generally have automatic and manual systems to scram the reactor in an emergency shut down. These systems insert large amounts of poison (often boron in the form of boric acid) into the reactor to shut the fission reaction down if unsafe conditions are detected or anticipated.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Most types of reactors are sensitive to a process variously known as xenon poisoning, or the iodine pit. The common fission product Xenon-135 produced in the fission process acts as a neutron poison that absorbs neutrons and therefore tends to shut the reactor down. Xenon-135 accumulation can be controlled by keeping power levels high enough to destroy it by neutron absorption as fast as it is produced. Fission also produces iodine-135, which in turn decays (with a half-life of 6.57 hours) to new xenon-135. When the reactor is shut down, iodine-135 continues to decay to xenon-135, making restarting the reactor more difficult for a day or two, as the xenon-135 decays into cesium-135, which is not nearly as poisonous as xenon-135, with a half-life of 9.2 hours. This temporary state is the "iodine pit." If the reactor has sufficient extra reactivity capacity, it can be restarted. As the extra xenon-135 is transmuted to xenon-136, which is much less a neutron poison, within a few hours the reactor experiences a "xenon burnoff (power) transient". Control rods must be further inserted to replace the neutron absorption of the lost xenon-135. Failure to properly follow such a procedure was a key step in the Chernobyl disaster.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Reactors used in nuclear marine propulsion (especially nuclear submarines) often cannot be run at continuous power around the clock in the same way that land-based power reactors are normally run, and in addition often need to have a very long core life without refueling. For this reason many designs use highly enriched uranium but incorporate burnable neutron poison in the fuel rods. This allows the reactor to be constructed with an excess of fissionable material, which is nevertheless made relatively safe early in the reactor's fuel burn cycle by the presence of the neutron-absorbing material which is later replaced by normally produced long-lived neutron poisons (far longer-lived than xenon-135) which gradually accumulate over the fuel load's operating life.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The energy released in the fission process generates heat, some of which can be converted into usable energy. A common method of harnessing this thermal energy is to use it to boil water to produce pressurized steam which will then drive a steam turbine that turns an alternator and generates electricity.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The neutron was discovered in 1932 by British physicist James Chadwick. The concept of a nuclear chain reaction brought about by nuclear reactions mediated by neutrons was first realized shortly thereafter, by Hungarian scientist Leó Szilárd, in 1933. He filed a patent for his idea of a simple reactor the following year while working at the Admiralty in London. However, Szilárd's idea did not incorporate the idea of nuclear fission as a neutron source, since that process was not yet discovered. Szilárd's ideas for nuclear reactors using neutron-mediated nuclear chain reactions in light elements proved unworkable.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Inspiration for a new type of reactor using uranium came from the discovery by Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Fritz Strassmann in 1938 that bombardment of uranium with neutrons (provided by an alpha-on-beryllium fusion reaction, a "neutron howitzer") produced a barium residue, which they reasoned was created by the fissioning of the uranium nuclei. Subsequent studies in early 1939 (one of them by Szilárd and Fermi) revealed that several neutrons were also released during the fissioning, making available the opportunity for the nuclear chain reaction that Szilárd had envisioned six years previously.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: On 2 August 1939 Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (written by Szilárd) suggesting that the discovery of uranium's fission could lead to the development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type", giving impetus to the study of reactors and fission. Szilárd and Einstein knew each other well and had worked together years previously, but Einstein had never thought about this possibility for nuclear energy until Szilard reported it to him, at the beginning of his quest to produce the Einstein-Szilárd letter to alert the U.S. government.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Shortly after, Hitler's Germany invaded Poland in 1939, starting World War II in Europe. The U.S. was not yet officially at war, but in October, when the Einstein-Szilárd letter was delivered to him, Roosevelt commented that the purpose of doing the research was to make sure "the Nazis don't blow us up." The U.S. nuclear project followed, although with some delay as there remained skepticism (some of it from Fermi) and also little action from the small number of officials in the government who were initially charged with moving the project forward.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The following year the U.S. Government received the Frisch–Peierls memorandum from the UK, which stated that the amount of uranium needed for a chain reaction was far lower than had previously been thought. The memorandum was a product of the MAUD Committee, which was working on the UK atomic bomb project, known as Tube Alloys, later to be subsumed within the Manhattan Project.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Eventually, the first artificial nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was constructed at the University of Chicago, by a team led by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, in late 1942. By this time, the program had been pressured for a year by U.S. entry into the war. The Chicago Pile achieved criticality on 2 December 1942 at 3:25 PM. The reactor support structure was made of wood, which supported a pile (hence the name) of graphite blocks, embedded in which was natural uranium oxide 'pseudospheres' or 'briquettes'.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Soon after the Chicago Pile, the U.S. military developed a number of nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project starting in 1943. The primary purpose for the largest reactors (located at the Hanford Site in Washington), was the mass production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Fermi and Szilard applied for a patent on reactors on 19 December 1944. Its issuance was delayed for 10 years because of wartime secrecy.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: "World's first nuclear power plant" is the claim made by signs at the site of the EBR-I, which is now a museum near Arco, Idaho. Originally called "Chicago Pile-4", it was carried out under the direction of Walter Zinn for Argonne National Laboratory. This experimental LMFBR operated by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission produced 0.8 kW in a test on 20 December 1951 and 100 kW (electrical) the following day, having a design output of 200 kW (electrical).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Besides the military uses of nuclear reactors, there were political reasons to pursue civilian use of atomic energy. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower made his famous Atoms for Peace speech to the UN General Assembly on 8 December 1953. This diplomacy led to the dissemination of reactor technology to U.S. institutions and worldwide.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The first nuclear power plant built for civil purposes was the AM-1 Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, launched on 27 June 1954 in the Soviet Union. It produced around 5 MW (electrical). It was built after the F-1 (nuclear reactor) which was the first reactor to go critical in Europe, and was also built by the Soviet Union.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: After World War II, the U.S. military sought other uses for nuclear reactor technology. Research by the Army led to the power stations for Camp Century, Greenland and McMurdo Station, Antarctica Army Nuclear Power Program. The Air Force Nuclear Bomber project resulted in the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment. The U.S. Navy succeeded when they steamed the USS "Nautilus" (SSN-571) on nuclear power 17 January 1955.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Sellafield, England was opened in 1956 with an initial capacity of 50 MW (later 200 MW).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The first portable nuclear reactor "Alco PM-2A" was used to generate electrical power (2 MW) for Camp Century from 1960 to 1963.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: All commercial power reactors are based on nuclear fission. They generally use uranium and its product plutonium as nuclear fuel, though a thorium fuel cycle is also possible. Fission reactors can be divided roughly into two classes, depending on the energy of the neutrons that sustain the fission chain reaction:


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In principle, fusion power could be produced by nuclear fusion of elements such as the deuterium isotope of hydrogen. While an ongoing rich research topic since at least the 1940s, no self-sustaining fusion reactor for any purpose has ever been built.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In 2003, the French Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) was the first to refer to "Gen II" types in "Nucleonics Week".


title: Nuclear reactor

text: More than a dozen advanced reactor designs are in various stages of development. Some are evolutionary from the PWR, BWR and PHWR designs above, some are more radical departures. The former include the advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR), two of which are now operating with others under construction, and the planned passively safe Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) and AP1000 units (see Nuclear Power 2010 Program).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Generation IV reactors are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched. These designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction before 2030. Current reactors in operation around the world are generally considered second- or third-generation systems, with the first-generation systems having been retired some time ago. Research into these reactor types was officially started by the Generation IV International Forum (GIF) based on eight technology goals. The primary goals being to improve nuclear safety, improve proliferation resistance, minimize waste and natural resource utilization, and to decrease the cost to build and run such plants.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Generation V reactors are designs which are theoretically possible, but which are not being actively considered or researched at present. Though some generation V reactors could potentially be built with current or near term technology, they trigger little interest for reasons of economics, practicality, or safety.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Controlled nuclear fusion could in principle be used in fusion power plants to produce power without the complexities of handling actinides, but significant scientific and technical obstacles remain. Despite research having started in the 1950s, no commercial fusion reactor is expected before 2050. The ITER project is currently leading the effort to harness fusion power.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Thermal reactors generally depend on refined and enriched uranium. Some nuclear reactors can operate with a mixture of plutonium and uranium (see MOX). The process by which uranium ore is mined, processed, enriched, used, possibly reprocessed and disposed of is known as the nuclear fuel cycle.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Under 1% of the uranium found in nature is the easily fissionable U-235 isotope and as a result most reactor designs require enriched fuel.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Enrichment involves increasing the percentage of U-235 and is usually done by means of gaseous diffusion or gas centrifuge. The enriched result is then converted into uranium dioxide powder, which is pressed and fired into pellet form. These pellets are stacked into tubes which are then sealed and called fuel rods. Many of these fuel rods are used in each nuclear reactor.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Most BWR and PWR commercial reactors use uranium enriched to about 4% U-235, and some commercial reactors with a high neutron economy do not require the fuel to be enriched at all (that is, they can use natural uranium). According to the International Atomic Energy Agency there are at least 100 research reactors in the world fueled by highly enriched (weapons-grade/90% enrichment) uranium. Theft risk of this fuel (potentially used in the production of a nuclear weapon) has led to campaigns advocating conversion of this type of reactor to low-enrichment uranium (which poses less threat of proliferation).


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Fissile U-235 and non-fissile but fissionable and fertile U-238 are both used in the fission process. U-235 is fissionable by thermal (i.e. slow-moving) neutrons. A thermal neutron is one which is moving about the same speed as the atoms around it. Since all atoms vibrate proportionally to their absolute temperature, a thermal neutron has the best opportunity to fission U-235 when it is moving at this same vibrational speed. On the other hand, U-238 is more likely to capture a neutron when the neutron is moving very fast. This U-239 atom will soon decay into plutonium-239, which is another fuel. Pu-239 is a viable fuel and must be accounted for even when a highly enriched uranium fuel is used. Plutonium fissions will dominate the U-235 fissions in some reactors, especially after the initial loading of U-235 is spent. Plutonium is fissionable with both fast and thermal neutrons, which make it ideal for either nuclear reactors or nuclear bombs.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: Most reactor designs in existence are thermal reactors and typically use water as a neutron moderator (moderator means that it slows down the neutron to a thermal speed) and as a coolant. But in a fast breeder reactor, some other kind of coolant is used which will not moderate or slow the neutrons down much. This enables fast neutrons to dominate, which can effectively be used to constantly replenish the fuel supply. By merely placing cheap unenriched uranium into such a core, the non-fissionable U-238 will be turned into Pu-239, "breeding" fuel.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: In thorium fuel cycle thorium-232 absorbs a neutron in either a fast or thermal reactor. The thorium-233 beta decays to protactinium-233 and then to uranium-233, which in turn is used as fuel. Hence, like uranium-238, thorium-232 is a fertile material.


title: Nuclear reactor

text: The amount of energy in the reservoir of nuclear fuel is frequently expressed in terms of "full-power days," which is the number of 24-hour periods (days) a reactor is scheduled for operation at full power output for the generation of heat energy. The number of full-power days in a reactor's operating cycle (between refueling outage times) is related to the amount of fissile uranium-235 (U-235) contained in the fuel assemblies at the beginning of the cycle. A higher percentage of U-235 in the core at the beginning of a cycle will permit the reactor to be run for a greater number of full-power days.