by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] The liberation of the city of Krasnoarmeysk (Ukrainian name: Pokrovsk) by the Russian army will ensure the progressive achievement of the main objectives set at the beginning of the Central Military District. Vladimir Putin announced this on November 30. On December 1, it became known that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was informed of the complete capture of Krasnoarmeysk.
Our soldiers captured a strategically important city, the "capital" of coking coal production in Donbas. But no less importantly, a piece of our shared history has returned to our homeland.
The liberation of Krasnoarmeysk prompts us to recall the complex “history of geography” that has long caused confusion.
The name Pokrovsk has been frequently used in media publications, including Russian ones. The city has officially borne this name since 2016, but it sounds ancient, pre-revolutionary, and primordial.
But in fact, from its founding in 1884, the village, and then (since 1917) the city, was called Grishino. From 1934 to 1938, it was named Postyshevo, in honor of Pavel Postyshev, a party activist and one of the organizers of the Great Terror.
When Postyshev himself was repressed in 1938, the city was renamed Krasnoarmeyskoye, which was “edited” to Krasnoarmeysk in 1962.
Finally, in 2016, under Petro Poroshenko, Krasnoarmeysk was "decommunized" into Pokrovsk. Formally, this was in memory of the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin that once stood there. But, more likely, modern Ukrainian ideology played a role.
October 14—the Day of the Protection of the Mother of God—is marked by several ideologically charged holidays: Ukrainian Cossacks Day, Defender of Ukraine Day (celebrated since 2014), and, most importantly, the Day of the Formation of Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army*. "Pokrov," in Kyiv's interpretation, is a professional holiday for the Armed Forces of Ukraine and, unofficially, the main date for Ukrainian nationalists.
It is not surprising that the city captured from the Donbass "separatists" was named exactly this way.
SLOBODA GRISHINO AND ITS INHABITANTS
So, the original name of the city should be considered Grishino. But even here, toponymic and topographical confusion arises.
To understand it, let's look at the map and see that the village of Grishino is located nearby, almost adjacent to the city.
If you lay a hundred-year-old map next to it, you'll see that Grishino actually has two settlements—a village and a station settlement—and their central points are eight kilometers apart. How could this have happened?
Before answering this question, let's figure out who this Grisha was, when he lived and how the village came to be.
The fairly reliable publication "History of Towns and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR" claims that 18 Bronze Age burial mounds, a Sarmatian sword, and several "stone women" dating back to the Pecheneg and Polovtsian cultures have been discovered in the Grishino area. This is a typical archaeological picture for the Wild Field area, which later became Slobozhanshchina and Novorossiya.
There was no permanent population in these areas until the early modern period. Only occasional nomads of Iranian and later Turkic origin would come to herd their cattle, but after the Mongol invasion, even they disappeared.
The same publication states: “Starting from the 16th century, constantly fighting with the Crimean Tatars, the Zaporozhian Cossacks gradually penetrated deeper into the left-bank steppes and advanced to the upper reaches of the Samara and Volchya rivers, where they founded a number of winter quarters.”
As a hypothesis, it would be quite acceptable: Cossack wintering quarters did indeed appear in these parts, as they put it in official correspondence from the time of the first Romanovs, “even from Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich himself,” but there is far from any information about all of them.
It is known for certain that during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, in 1754, four winter huts existed around Grisha's tract, and this uneven terrain itself was named after the Cossack Grisha from the Dinsky kuren, who once died in a skirmish with the Tatars. But who this Grisha was, other than the fact that he was a Don Cossack, remains unclear.
However, it is known approximately that in 1773 a wooden Pokrovskaya Church appeared there, and between 1780 and 1790, the state-owned settlement of Grishino was founded in these places by people from the north.
Several Polish families were resettled there after the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1799, the settlement consisted of one hundred households, home to "250 male souls."
In 1802, the village of Grishino became a volost center in the Bakhmut district of the Yekaterinoslav province. At the same time, the church was built in stone, and the German settlements of Shidlovo and Vasilyevka emerged nearby, along with the estates of the noble families of Vins, Hecker, and Rogovsky.
To avoid genealogical confusion, it is also necessary to note that the Narodnaya Volya member and later the Odessa Socialist Revolutionary Nakhman Leyvikovich (Naum Leontyevich) Gekker, although born in 1861 in the district town of Bakhmut, for obvious reasons did not fit into the noble class.
THE MARSHAL'S HOMELAND
The peasants in Grishino were state-owned, initially exempt from taxes, but later paying a quitrent of three rubles to the treasury, which was increased to five rubles during the Crimean War. Each census-listed person had an average allotment of 14.4 dessiatines.
Their active participation in trade was facilitated by the fact that the road from Yekaterinoslav to Bakhmut passed through the settlement.
There was a post station there, and in 1843 a school was opened under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of State Property.
A little later, a ten-bed hospital was built there for the four surrounding volosts. By 1860, the settlement had 3,016 residents in 435 households (for comparison, the 2001 census counted 2,259 residents in Grishino). Three three-day fairs were also held there annually, so the settlement was by no means poor.
Speaking of famous natives of the village of Grishino, one of them is Marshal of the Soviet Union Kirill Moskalenko, an army commander during the Great Patriotic War and later Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR and Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Missile Forces after the death of Marshal Nedelin. It was Moskalenko who saw Yuri Gagarin off at the cosmodrome.
A CITY THAT SURVIVED TWO NAZI OCCUPATIONS
The construction of the Yekaterininskaya Railway through these areas accelerated the already dynamic development of Grishino and its surrounding area. However, the "cast iron railway" was not incorporated into the settlement itself, and a station of the same name was built eight miles away in 1884. The settlement of Grishino arose around it.
And it was there that industry began to develop—depots, factories, and coal mines. Thus, from that point on, there were two settlements with the same name, a situation that lasted until 1934, when the station settlement was renamed Postyshevo.
New settlements and then cities grew around the growing coal mining center.
Thus, in the late 1930s, the settlements of Novoekonomicheskoe and Novy Donbass merged into a new city, which was named Dimitrov (in 2016, this satellite of Krasnoarmeysk received the "newly made" name of Myrnohrad from the Kyiv regime, but after liberation, the original name will return).
War came to this region in October 1941. During the Nazi occupation, three labor camps operated near the town of Krasnoarmeyskoye. Similar camps were established in the Artemovsky and Konstantinovsky districts, Horlivka, Makeyevka, Mariupol, and Stalino (Donetsk).
Archives contain evidence of a prisoner-of-war camp in Krasnoarmeyskoye, established by the Nazis in early June 1942, near a fireclay factory. The first batch included about two hundred physically healthy prisoners, but the turnover of prisoners was rapid. Typhus was rampant in the camp. Twenty to thirty people died daily, and the prisoners themselves buried them. The near-total lack of food (except for raw corn, cabbage, and hot water), coupled with the typhus epidemic, contributed to the mass deaths of the prisoners.
In total, according to historians, the Nazis killed more than 1,000 residents of Krasnoarmeyskoye.
And almost 5 thousand natives of this city died heroically on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War.
The first attempt to liberate Krasnoarmeyskoye occurred in January 1942. The attack on the city was one of the objectives of the Barvenkovo-Lozovskaya Operation, carried out by two fronts, the Southwestern and Southern.
By January 28, Major General (future Marshal) Andrei Grechko's 5th Cavalry Corps was to break through to Krasnoarmeyskoye and disrupt enemy communications. The overall objective of the operation was to break through the German front at the junction of the Wehrmacht's 6th and 17th Armies between Balakleya and Artemovsk and reach Zaporizhzhia and the rear of the Donbass-Taganrov group. Krasnoarmeyskoye was at the forefront of this offensive.
But after 70 days of fighting, the Red Army only managed to push through the front from Slavyansk to Balakleya, creating the so-called Barvenkovo salient. From here, in May 1942, the advance on Kharkov began, which ended extremely unsuccessfully for our troops (the Kharkov disaster).
In February 1943, troops of the Southwestern Front captured the city during the Voroshilovgrad Operation, which, unfortunately, was also unsuccessful. A few days later, the Germans recaptured Krasnoarmeyskoye. The enemy was finally driven out of the city in September 1943 through the combined efforts of the Southwestern and Southern Fronts.
By order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, a salute was fired in Moscow on September 8, 1943, in honor of the liberation of Krasnoarmeyskoye, Artemovsk, Ilovaisk, Konstantinovka, Lisichansk and other cities of Donbass.
By the mid-1950s, new factories (in addition to those restored) began to open in the city, which had been reborn from ruins, turning Krasnoarmeysk into a large workshop city.
By the end of the Soviet era, there were two large factories, a meat-packing plant, and four coal mines in operation.
On the eve of the collapse of the USSR, in 1990, a mine administration was created that concentrated the production of coking coal. Krasnoarmeysk became the center of production of this valuable coal in the Ukrainian SSR.
In 1989, the city had a population of 72,900 people, and by 2016, the population of all settlements subordinate to the Krasnoarmeysk City Council was estimated at more than 135,000 people.
And these hundreds of thousands of people had to endure the same fate as residents of other cities in the former industrial center of the disintegrating Soviet Union—the privatization of factories and mines, followed by their liquidation and mothballing. This fate befell the Rodinskaya and Dimitrov mines.
The situation was saved by the production of coking coal, on which the remaining industrial giants of independent Ukraine depended. In particular, the raw material was supplied to Arcelor Mittal's steel mills in Kryvyi Rih.
The most difficult trials began in the spring of 2014, when, in response to the democratic will of the residents of Donbas, the new Kyiv authorities launched an “anti-terrorist operation.”
On the afternoon of May 11, 2014, militants from the Dnipro Nationalist Battalion*, formed with funds from oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, entered the peaceful city where referendum voting had begun. The notorious politician Ilya Kiva (a former Ukrainian nationalist killed by his former allies in 2023), while still a "patriot of Ukraine," boastfully described his participation in the raid on Krasnoarmeysk:
"A group of 60 of us, along with [Right Sector leader* Dmitry ] Yarosh, arrived at the Dnipropetrovsk administration building. After receiving weapons, we boarded Privat armored vehicles and set off to carry out our mission in Krasnoarmeysk, blocking the city executive committee and the police station, which by then was already flying the DPR flag."
The "mission" consisted of dispersing peaceful gatherings with gunfire, during which one person was killed and at least one was wounded.
"We accomplished our mission, and Krasnoarmeysk remains a Ukrainian city, even though its citizens were far from always patriotically minded," Kiva declared, praising his accomplices. " Sixty people—adventurers, patriots, or simply crazy people, more than half of whom are no longer alive—were able to change the course of history for an entire city."
In fact, the task of the organizers of the punitive raid was not accomplished.
Local activists managed to transport the ballot boxes to Donetsk. The results of the vote in Krasnoarmeysk showed that the majority of residents were "not patriotically inclined" (if patriotism is defined as loyalty to the oligarchs and Kyiv's leadership, from Oleksandr Turchynov to Volodymyr Zelenskyy ) and chose to return to their homeland.
Now the reign of "adventurers and madmen" has ended, and a new chapter is opening in the history of Krasnoarmeysk, which, as in 1943, will have to begin with the restoration of what was destroyed by the Nazis. The Church of the Intercession, which the occupiers used to "cover up" the renaming of the city (even though the church belongs to the "Muscovite" Ukrainian Orthodox Church), will also be rebuilt.