Kyiv Central Post Office Mystery: The 1989 Collapse and the Number 13

A look back at the terrible tragedy in the center of Kyiv in 1989. What happened that day?

"Black Wednesday," "Black August": that is what longtime Kyivans called the day and month in 1989 when the portico of the Central Post Office on Khreshchatyk collapsed onto the people standing below. The events of that day shook the city to its core and gave rise to countless rumors and theories. Many people simply could not believe that such a thing could happen in the very heart of the capital.

The Authorities Express Condolences

This is what the newspapers wrote about the disaster at the time:

"From the Kyiv City Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the City Council of People's Deputies: On August 2, 1989, at 4:20 p.m., a collapse occurred at the entrance to the Central Post Office building. Eleven citizens were killed, and two injured people were hospitalized. The Kyiv City Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the City Council of People's Deputies express their sincere condolences to the families, relatives and friends of the dead and injured."

Buried Alive

It was drizzling in Kyiv that day. As usual, people hurried about their business, the city's fountains were running, and cars and trolleybuses glided along the main avenue. The clock on the tower of the Trade Unions Building struck four. Rush hour was approaching. Accordion music drifted across Maidan Nezalezhnosti, where former paratroopers and Afghan war veterans were gathering for their annual reunion. Some wore dress uniforms and medals; others were in civilian clothes but with striped vests and berets. The rattle of jackhammers from the post office sounded a bit like machine-gun fire. Soon it fell silent too, as the workers went off for lunch.

Then a horrifying sight appeared before the onlookers. Where a moment earlier there had stood a grand stone colonnade with an elegant balustrade, a massive balcony and semicircular arches, there was now, visible through the dust, a heap of broken Corinthian capitals, twisted rebar and chunks of brickwork. The round heraldic pediment that had crowned the canopy lay next to a fallen column, together forming a giant exclamation mark.

"There are people under there!" was the first thought that struck the witnesses. The paratroopers rushed to help, frantically trying to clear the rubble. Within minutes, civil defense units, police, firefighters and construction workers joined the rescue. At first it was assumed that the number of victims would be small, since the passage under the portico was narrow and short, just 1.5 m wide and 5 m long. But when the rescue work was over, the toll was far worse: eleven people were dead, and two more were taken to the hospital with injuries (rumor in the city soon put the number of dead at 13). Others refused medical help. The heavy toll is explained by the fact that the post office entrance was always crowded: it was a favorite spot for dates and business meetings.

Theories and Speculation

How could this have happened? Public opinion was to some extent talked down with explanations about gross design miscalculations, structural flaws and poor-quality building materials. Still, people understood that negligence had played its part, just as it had in the Kurenivka mudslide disaster of 1961.

Shortly before the tragedy, workers had begun removing the facing tiles, which formed a single unit with the cement layer and the four load-bearing columns. The renovation was due to be handed over in early August. Could the "stripped" supports bear the weight of a 700-ton structure? There were plenty of questions about safety rules, but by then it was too late.

There was another theory: sabotage. Such a thing would be horrifying at any time, but in the Soviet Union of that era it was an extraordinary event. Two months before the collapse, an unknown man called a Kyiv district police station and reported that a bomb had been planted in the Central Post Office. A response team found no bomb. But rumors began to spread around the city about enemy plots in a block that had been considered "ill-fated" since tsarist times.

A Bit of History

The city block between Duma Square (today's Maidan Nezalezhnosti) and Prorizna Street had always attracted close attention. Perhaps because of its prime location, at the turn of the 20th century it was chosen by "priestesses of love," who strolled in the evenings past the dazzling windows of the Georges pastry shop and the grand entrance of the Grand Hotel. Here, too, at the old postal station (where the television center building stands today), many people and horses drowned during a May thunderstorm in 1839. And most remarkably, house No. 22 on what was then Khreshchatytska Street (the Central Post Office also bears the number 22) entered the annals of Kyiv's mysteries as the scene of a strange poltergeist case.

On November 16, 1902, the landlady Diakova was horrified to see the furniture in one of her apartments start moving on its own, bedspreads flying and pillows jumping. The city police, summoned to the scene, were unable to subdue the invisible pranksters. The apartment was sealed, and for years afterward the city buzzed with incredible stories.

A curious fact: ten years later, one April, Ivan Bunin and Korney Chukovsky took a stroll along Khreshchatyk. It is not impossible that Chukovsky made a mental note of the "flying blankets and pillows" theme, since the fantastic plot of his children's tale Moidodyr unfolds much like the written reports of the Kyiv policemen.

That Familiar Number "13"

The present Central Post Office building was erected in the early 1950s on the site of buildings destroyed during World War II. Yet even that destruction follows a certain mystical pattern. On September 24, 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, the first building blown up on Khreshchatyk by explosives left behind by the retreating Soviets was a huge apartment block in this very "postal" quarter, at the corner of Khreshchatyk and Prorizna Street. The old post office (on the site of today's television center) collapsed after it. That too happened on a Wednesday, shortly after 4 p.m.

As for the number 13, which rumor attached to the death toll, it must be admitted that the "devil's dozen" is built into the architecture of the post office itself. Thirteen vertical rows of windows divide the main facade on the Khreshchatyk side; on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti side the facade has 13 granite-framed shop windows; and the molded capitals of the portico, together with the pediment, also add up to 13. But there is no need to make a tragedy of it: St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv also has 13 domes, and that takes nothing away from its sacred status.

The Secret of the Clock

One more fateful coincidence occurred that day, involving the main witness to these mysterious twists of time and space: the clock above the post office entrance. Like the clock that hangs above the main entrance today, it showed the time on different continents. The graphics on the dial have since been completely redesigned, but the clock has kept its original form.

The clock was a special attraction for visitors from far-flung places. Each of them enjoyed glancing at the dial, which marked many cities of the Soviet Union arranged along the sun's path from east to west. Romantic Kyivans liked to set up dates somewhere "under the skies" of Paris, Rio de Janeiro or New York.

A curious feature of the clock was that both hands ended in zigzag pointers shaped like Jupiter's "thunderbolts," and every minute the tip of each bolt lit up the name of the city where it was then the same hour as in Kyiv. Jokers used to say that if the two bolts ever touched, Jupiter would truly be angered. Perhaps they should not have joked about it.

The time of the tragedy, 4:20 p.m., turns out to be the very point on the dial where the hour and minute hands overlap, and with them the two "thunderbolts." The joke had come true.

A Fateful Pattern

During the collapse the clock was partly damaged: a quarter of its glass was knocked out, precisely where the numeral "4" (for 16:00) stood, the end point of the count. The lightning-shaped hands stood out sharply against a black square. Which city names had been lost from the dial?

Researchers managed to reconstruct the missing fragment. The cities were Vladivostok, Magadan and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, in the Far East, a region from which tourists rarely came to Kyiv, least of all from Sakhalin, the easternmost edge of the former USSR.

Imagine the researchers' astonishment when, going through the list of those killed under the rubble, they found that more than a quarter of the victims were residents of the Sakhalin region: two women (born in 1946 and 1934) and a 12-year-old boy. Remarkably, they died at the very moment the hour hand touched the name of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Besides them, the victims included five Kyivans, two Muscovites and one resident of the town of Novyi Oskol in the Belgorod region. Two local residents were discharged from the hospital after a long course of treatment.