Kharkiv: the second city, and what it was built for

Kharkiv was the capital of Soviet Ukraine from 1919 to 1934, and the decision to move the capital to Kyiv did not remove what had been built there. The city was designed as an administrative and industrial centre and it remained one.

What the city does

Engineering above everything. Turbine manufacturing, aviation, tractor and heavy machinery production, electrical equipment, instrumentation. The Malyshev works, the turbine plant and the aviation plant are among the largest industrial complexes in the country, and the engineering skill base around them is deep.

Universities are the second pillar. Kharkiv has one of the largest concentrations of higher education in eastern Europe — the national university, the polytechnic, the aviation institute, medical and agricultural universities, and a research infrastructure inherited from the Soviet academy system. Student population before 2022 was in the low hundreds of thousands, including a substantial international cohort.

The combination produced the third pillar: a technology sector that grew rapidly through the 2010s on the back of engineering graduates who did not want to work in a turbine plant.

The geography

Kharkiv sits about forty kilometres from the russian border. Before 2014 that was a commercial advantage — cross-border trade, a natural logistics position, and industrial supply chains that ran in both directions.

After 2014 it became a strategic exposure, and after 2022 it became the defining fact about the city. Industrial output relocated, the university sector moved to distance teaching and partial relocation, and the population fell sharply before partially returning.

The city has kept functioning throughout in a way that surprised most external observers, and the metro — deep, Soviet-built, doubling as shelter — is a significant part of the reason.

What this means for the future

Three observations.

The engineering skill base is the city's durable asset and it is not easily relocated. Machine tools can be moved; a workforce that knows how to operate them and a university system that renews it cannot be reproduced elsewhere quickly.

The technology sector demonstrated that it can operate distributed. A substantial share of Kharkiv's IT workforce relocated within Ukraine and kept delivering, which is the clearest evidence that the sector's assets are people rather than premises.

And the reconstruction case for the city is unusually strong, because what needs rebuilding is physical infrastructure attached to human capital that still exists. That is a much better proposition than rebuilding infrastructure in a place the population has left permanently.

Practical notes

For anyone considering the city in a post-conflict planning horizon: the industrial premises stock is large and much of it is underused, the engineering labour pool is the deepest in the country outside Kyiv, and land and property costs are a fraction of the western regions.

The offsetting factors are obvious and do not need restating. What is worth stating is that the calculation will change quickly if the security position changes, and companies that have done the analysis in advance will move faster than those starting it then.

The city itself, for a visitor: an enormous constructivist administrative building on the largest square in Europe, a nineteenth-century centre, and a university culture that gives it a different texture from any other Ukrainian city.

Related in this archive

• The sector that grew through everything: Ukrainian software services
• Khreshchatyk: a street rebuilt three times
• From Mendeleev to the first Soviet computer: Kyiv's technical inheritance
• Ukraine Annual Review 2014: the year everything deferred came due

That an engineering and university city sits forty kilometres from a border tells you this country's geography in one sentence. I first went to Kharkiv on a supplier visit, and walking between the plants what struck me was that this is not an industrial zone but an industrial city — the school, the library and the machine tool in the same neighbourhood. Its future will turn on that.