Dnieper
The Dnieper River, (Ukrainian: Dnipro, Russian: Dnepr, Belarusian: Dnyapro, ancient Greek: Borysthenes) is the fourth longest river in Europe with a total length of 1,367 miles (2,200 km).[1] The Dnieper River has played a major role in Russian and Eastern European history.
The first Russian state of Kievan Rus rose from the city-state of Kiev, founded by Vikings as a result of the early small port town‘s location on the great north-south water route, the Amber Road, flowing between Scandinavia (the Swedish Viking Varangians) and Byzantian Constantinople. Thus, the Dnieper gave birth to‚ the mother of Russian cities‘ and connected Kievan Rus to what would become the source of much of Russian culture: Greek or Eastern Orthodoxy. The Swedes, who carried on a prolific slave trade of captured Slavs with Muslims in Constantinople, were finally driven out of Slavic lands after the Battle of Poltava in 1709, ending the Great Northern War.
The Zaporozhian Cossacks, famous in Russia and what came to be known as "Ukraine" in Soviet times, were located on the Dnieper, dwelt in the marshes and islands on the Lower Dniper near its Black Sea estuary. The Dnieper became the dividing line or outskirts (okraina) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire, with the western side facing south called the Right Bank and the eastern side known as the Left Bank. In the Soviet era, the Dniper’s six major hydroelectric stations and damns were symbols of communist modernization. One is featured near the end of Boris Pasternak’s famous novel Doctor Zhivago, as well as in the British film version of the novel.
The Dnieper was the focus of great battles during what Russians call the Great Patriotic War and what the West calls World War II. Following the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, the Battle for Dnieper was one of the largest operations of the war, involving four million troops, stretching over nearly 900 miles of front, and lasting over four months in 1943. It opened the way to the liberation of Kiev from the Nazi fascist army on 28 October 1944.
The Dnieper – more accurately one of its tributaries, the Pripyat – was the locus of the world’s first great nuclear disaster in 1986 at Chernobyl. The poetic Ukrainian name for the river, Slavutych or Slavuta, taken from an ancient Kievan Rus name for the river became the name of the town used to house displaced Chernobyl nuclear power plant workers.
