The History of Chernobyl: A Brief Introduction
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The first documentation of Chernobyl dates back to a 1193 charter in which it was described as a hunting lodge of knyaz Rostislavich. A “knyaz” can be loosely translated in English to Prince, or Duke. In the 13th century, Chernobyl was a crown village of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1566 the village was granted to royal cavalry captain Filon Kmita as a fiefdom, which at the time was a common practice of liege lords granting land to a vassal in return for their allegiance. The province that contained Chernobyl became a part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1569. Over two hundred years later, in 1793, the province became annexed by the Russian Empire. Shortly before the 20th century, the population of Chernobyl was comprised of a large Jewish community as well as many Ukrainian and Polish peasants.
The religious history of Chernobyl has been very diverse. Citizens of several different denominations have inhabited the city over the years, including Hasidic and other Orthodox Jews, the Christian Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian peasantry (forced to convert to the Greek Catholic by Poland after 1596), and later Russian Orthodoxy, which came along with Russia’s unification with Ukraine.
In 1898, the population of Chernobyl was approximately 10,800, of which 7,200 were Jews. The village was later occupied during World War I, and was brutally fought for in the subsequent Civil War between Ukrainians and Bolsheviks. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1920, Chernobyl was taken by the Polish army only to be seized by the Red Army shortly after and then incorporated into the Ukrainian USSR in 1921.
Due to Stalin implementing his farming collectivization campaign between 1929 and 1933, a great famine ensued and the population of Chernobyl suffered greatly. During the Frontier Clearances of 1936, the majority of the Polish community in Chernobyl was transported to Kazakhstan. The German occupation during World War II resulted in most of the Jewish population being killed off between 1941 and 1944. Then in 1964, Chernobyl was chosen to be the site of Ukraine’s first nuclear power station.
At the time of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster in 1986, Chernobyl was part of the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chernobyl officially became part of the independent nation of Ukraine, as it remains to this day.
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