Kharkiv was ground zero for much evil; no wonder Putin is bombing it to hell
In December 1917 Kharkiv became the first city in Ukraine occupied by the Soviet troops of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko.[24] The Bolsheviks in the Tsentralna Rada moved to Kharkiv shortly after to make it their stronghold and formed their own Rada on 13 December 1917.[24][25] By February 1918 Bolshevik forces had captured much of Ukraine.[26]
Prior to the formation of the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks established Kharkiv as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (from 1919 to 1934) in opposition to the Ukrainian People's Republic with its capital of Kyiv.[32]
In the early 1930s, the Holodomor famine drove many people off the land into the cities, and to Kharkiv in particular, in search of food. Many people died and were secretly buried in mass graves in the cemeteries surrounding the city.[citation needed]
In 1934 hundreds of Ukrainian writers, intellectuals and cultural workers were arrested and executed in the attempt to eradicate all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism in Art. The purges continued into 1938. Blind Ukrainian street musicians Kobzars were also gathered in Kharkiv and murdered by the NKVD.[39]
During April and May 1940 about 3,900 Polish prisoners of Starobelsk camp were executed in the Kharkiv NKVD building, later secretly buried on the grounds of an NKVD pansionat in Pyatykhatky forest (part of the Katyn massacre) on the outskirts of Kharkiv.[40] The site also contains the numerous bodies of Ukrainian cultural workers who were arrested and shot in the 1937–38 Stalinist purges.
The significant Jewish population of Kharkiv (Kharkiv's Jewish community prided itself with the second largest synagogue in Europe) suffered greatly during the war. Between December 1941 and January 1942, an estimated 15,000 Jews were killed and buried in a mass grave by the Germans in a ravine outside of town named Drobytsky Yar.[45]
Of the population of 700,000 that Kharkiv had before the start of World War II, 120,000 became Ost-Arbeiter (slave worker) in Germany, 30,000 were executed and 80,000 starved to death during the war.[17]
Moar here : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kharkiv