page_title: Dnipro
section_title: Closed city
hierarchical_section_title: Dnipro / History / Closed city
caption_attribution_description: English: Unfinished Parus Hotel in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine
context_page_description: 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 central-eastern part of Ukraine, 391 kilometres southeast of the Ukrainian capital Kiev on the Dnieper River, after which it is named. Dnipro is the administrative centre of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Administratively, it is incorporated as a city of oblast significance, the centre of Dnipro municipality and extraterritorial administrative centre of Dnipro Raion. It has a population of 998,103.
  Archeological findings suggest that the first fortified town in the territory of present-day Dnipro probably dates to the mid-16th century. Other findings suggest that the town Samar, now a neighborhood in Dnipro's Samarskyi District, existed in the 1520s.
  Known as Ekaterinoslav until 1925, the city was formally inaugurated by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great in 1787 as the administrative centre of the newly-acquired vast territories of imperial New Russia, including those ceded to Russia by the Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca.
context_section_description: 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.
  Joseph Stalin suggested special secret training for highly qualified engineers and scientists to become rocket construction specialists.
  In 1954 the administration of this automobile factory opened a secret design office with the name "Southern" (konstruktorskoe biuro Yuzhnoe – in Russian) to construct military missiles and rocket engines. Hundreds of talented physicists, engineers and machine designers moved from Moscow and other large cities in the Soviet Union to Dnipropetrovsk to join this "Southern" design office. In 1965, the secret Plant No. 586 was transferred to the Ministry of General Machine-Building of the USSR. The next year this plant officially changed its name to "the Southern Machine-building Factory" (Yuzhnyi mashino-stroitel’nyi zavod) or in abbreviated Russian, simply Yuzhmash.
  The first "General Constructor" and head of the "Southern" design office was Mikhail Yangel, a prominent scientist and outstanding designer of space rockets, who managed not only the design office, but the entire factory from 1954 to 1971. Yangel designed the first powerful rockets and space military equipment for the Soviet Ministry of Defence.
  In 1951 the Southern Machine-building Factory began manufacturing and testing new military rockets for the battlefield. The range of these first missiles was only 270 kilometres (168 miles). By 1959 Soviet scientists and engineers developed new technology, and as a result, the "Southern" design office (KBYu – as abbreviated in Russian) started a new machine-building project making ballistic missiles. Under the leadership of Yangel, KBYu produced such powerful rocket engines that the range of these ballistic missiles was practically without limits. During the 1960s, these powerful rocket engines were used as launch vehicles for the first Soviet space ships. During Makarov's directorship, Yuzhmash designed and manufactured four generations of missile complexes of different types. These included space launch vehicles Kosmos, Tsyklon-2, Tsyklon-3 and Zenit. Under the leadership of Yangel's successor, V. Utkin, the KBYu created a unique space-rocket system called Energia-Buran. Yuzhmash engineers manufactured 400 technical devices that were launched in artificial satellites (Sputniks). For the first time in the world space industry, the Dnipropetrovsk missile plant organised the serial production of space Sputniks. By the 1980s, this plant manufactured 67 different types of space ships, 12 space research complexes and four defence space rocket systems.
  These systems were used not only for purely military purposes by the Ministry of Defence, but also for space research, for global radio and television networks, and for ecological monitoring. Yuzhmash initiated and sponsored the international space program of socialist countries, called Interkosmos.
  On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, KBYu had 9 regular and corresponding members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, 33 full professors and 290 scientists holding a PhD They awarded scientific degrees and presided over a prestigious graduate school at KBYu, which attracted talented students of physics from all over the USSR. More than 50,000 people worked at Yuzhmash. At the end of the 1950s, Yuzhmash became the main Soviet design and manufacturing centre for different types of missile complexes. The Soviet Ministry of Defence included Yuzhmash in its strategic plans. The military rocket systems manufactured in Dnipropetrovsk became the major component of the newly born Soviet Missile Forces of Strategic Purpose.
  According to contemporaries, Yuzhmash was a separate entity inside the Soviet state. After a long period of competition with the Moscow centre of r
caption: The unfinished 'Parus' hotel on the embankment has become a symbol of poor economic planning in the Soviet era.
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