Bessarabska Square in Kyiv: What Was There Before Lenin
Bessarabska Square has a rich history of its own, full of dramatic moments that have nothing to do with the "leader" whose statue once stood here.
The history of Bessarabska Square goes back to the mid-16th century. At the time it was not a square at all: the Lutheran community of Kyiv established a cemetery here, which was closed in the early 19th century as Khreshchatyk was being built up. The cemetery made itself known again a little later: when the city's Bessarabka sewer pipe was laid to drain the wastewater that kept flooding Khreshchatyk, workers often came across remains of coffins and skeletons.
By the late 1830s the area had become a square, and a spontaneous market quickly sprang up. The traders were peasants arriving from Bessarabia (hence the name) and from other southern and western provinces of the empire. Even then, Kyiv residents had a poor opinion of the square, which only grew worse as unsightly shops and stalls appeared around the market, along with hundreds of idle beggars. On top of everything else, the square collected runoff from Lypky and the boulevard and periodically turned into a stinking swamp.
The first monument associated with the square was to Bohdan Khmelnytskyi (1869–1881), and the square bore the hetman's name until 1915.
This is how Bessarabska Square once looked.
The square's image improved significantly after the covered market building, designed by the Polish architect Henryk Gay, appeared here in 1912. The unsightly shops and tents vanished, and the police began keeping an eye on the beggars who had once numbered in the hundreds.
The square's golden age came at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the prestigious National, Palais Royal (on the site later occupied by Mandarin Plaza) and Orion hotels were built here.
Shevchenko Boulevard is first mentioned in documents in 1834 as Bulvarna Street. From 1850 to 1869 it was called both Shoseina and Universytetska. From 1869 to 1919 it was known as Bibikovskyi Boulevard, after Governor-General Dmitry Bibikov. It has borne its present name since 1919.
The rapid development of the boulevard, and its deliberate planting with lindens, chestnuts and, in the 1840s, Lombardy poplars, was linked to the opening of Kyiv University on Volodymyrska Street. Behind the university, a botanical garden was laid out along the boulevard (now the Fomin Botanical Garden). St. Volodymyr's Cathedral was also founded here in the second half of the 19th century.
Monument to the sugar industrialist and renowned patron Oleksii Bobrynskyi (the site was later occupied by the Shchors monument; Symona Petliury Street leads down from here to the railway station).
The Lenin monument was erected here in 1946; its author was the sculptor Sergei Merkurov. Many Kyiv residents found the choice of location strange and hard to understand: during the German occupation, the Nazis had regularly carried out mass executions on this spot, and it would surely have been far more fitting to commemorate the victims of the occupation rather than a communist leader whose statue could have been placed almost anywhere.
Locals used to joke that Lenin was cold without a coat, because Taras Shevchenko, who stands a little farther up the boulevard in the park named after him, had taken it.
On December 8, 2013, during a mass Euromaidan rally, the monument was pulled down from its pedestal and badly damaged. The Svoboda party claimed responsibility for toppling it.
