Residents of Artemivsk in Donetsk Oblast decided to return the city’s historical name of Bakhmut, following a series of public hearings held last week, the city’s governing council announced on Aug. 25.
Held on Aug. 17-Aug. 21 at five public
schools, the consultations involved residents, city council members, civil
society organizations and the media. They were held to enforce a
“de-communization” law that went into effect in May. It requires 871
municipalities and villages nationwide to either change or revert to their
city’s historical name.
“Proposals were heard on the renaming of
cities and streets,” reads the Artemivsk city
council statement. “A decision was made
based on the results of discussions to return the historical name of the city.”
Artemvisk residents failed to rename the city
to Bakhmut in a referendum held soon after Ukraine gained independence in 1991
with only about a quarter voting for the change.
The city was founded as Bakhmut in 1571 as a
kozak outpost and was named after the river tributary of Bakhmutska. Kozaks
patrolled the area and resisted predatory attacks by Tatar hordes and protected
fishing and farming lands along the Siverskyi Donets River on the south and
eastern plain.
According to the Artemivsk city council
website, Bakhmut had by the end of the 18th century become the center of one of
the biggest counties in the Russian Empire, being second in size only to Moscow
County. When the USSR took over the city it became the region’s first capital.
In 1924 its name was changed to Artemvisk –
after the name of Artem, the nom de guerre of Russian revolutionary Fyodor
Sergeyev who headed the province’s executive committee.
“He actually had a very distant
relationship to Donbas,” Nina Lapchynska, director of the Holodomor Victims in
Ukraine Memorial museum, told Radio Liberty. “But they (Communist) authorities
decided after his death to give the city its name – as always, to begin
perpetuating the memory.”
Currently, Artemivsk has a population of
107,000, according to the city council. It is an industrial city with the
country’s only plant for processing non-ferrous metals. The Artemivsk
Winery still uses the classic
champenoise method of producing sparkling wine. Artemsil, a 130-year-old salt
extracting and processing plant, is also located in the city.
Foreign investors such as, Germany’s Knauf,
France’s Lafarge, Poland’s Forte, Ireland’s Kingspan and Lithuania’s Energia
currently have operations in the city.
Artemivsk also is home to the first drama
theater in the Donbas, according to the city council.
Other cities in the region had their names changed
during the Soviet era. Current regional capital Donetsk was known as
Oleksandrivka, Yuzivka and Stalino, for example. Nearby Sloviansk, like Bakhmut,
was also a kozak outpost and was known as Tor.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected]
